(Wow I have totally embarrassed myself, I wonder if I should even post this…. oh well)

Etc.
If there’s one thing I’ve said over and over here (and believe me there ain’t just one), it’s that one can’t do a search on 40-year-old evidence. Matt Crowley has it just right: it’s fetishizing, not research, and it isn’t moving the field forward.

And no company of scientists would need to be told about the dangers of taking something on which no consensus can be reached as holotypic in any way.

My only point is this: with all the hashing over this film has gotten - and no evidence that all the facets of such a fake would have been logistically possible, much less that it was actually done - it is more than worth repeatedly bringing that point up. (218 posts!) At least one young “mainstream” scientist has blogged quite effectively on this point (J. Darren Naish, one of whose blogs Loren featured here, “Frame 352 And All That”). More are entering the field every day. The more enter this discussion, the more are likely not to reject it out of hand, and to say: there’s something to this.

And compare notes. And look at the rest of the data.

And maybe, at long last, get us somewhere.

Although I tend to be a skeptic, rest assured that the debunker arguments do not answer things for me in a completely satisfactory way and I am nowhere near rejecting sasquatch as a real creature. Unfortunately, I do have to accept the obvious need for more compelling evidence if funding and genuine interest from the scientific community are to get under way. This video unfortunately is not going to do it apparently, and no matter how compelling I may find it, I can see why not. If there is even a chance that it is not real, then any evidence or theory based on it is flawed. This is one reason why reproducible results are required in an experiment, because even the slightest chance that the results were influenced by an unknown factor would render any data gathered useless. No matter that the skeptics cannot reproduce it or explain exactly how it happened, the footage is still effectively an unknown and scientists just cannot do much with that as it stands now. I can appreciate this mode of thinking and I personally do not want to base too much on this video alone. Sasquatch research deserves better.

As far as this video goes, it is indeed just something to ponder, but as it stands I just think it cannot and should not be embraced fully as a bona fide sasquatch as long as some doubt is there. As far as sasquatch itself goes, I agree that it is not in the best interests of science to fully disregard the possibility. Fortunately, even some of the more hardcore skeptics here do not do that, so what is really needed is new evidence and I mean something that is really going to kick scientific interest into full gear. When that happens, I am sure there are going to be well funded researchers out in force. Please don’t take my skeptical bent as any sort of failure to science. I am approaching this phenomena with an open mind, but at the same time an understanding of what science requires, and my ideas often run quite the balancing act. Hard to stay up on the fence sometimes.

This one is about perceptions. Ideally it would have to be done on groups of people, many groups, for a decent sampling. Here’s the basic concept. A group of people is taken camping for a weekend. They will know they will be seeing something, at some point, but not be told what. Some may suspect, that’s in the nature of the human mind.

At some point of the weekend there will be one of three presences passing by at a distance. A bear, a man in bulky outdoor clothing, or a man in a bigfoot costume. Finally there should be a control element of no encounter at all for some. The assignment of which it is should be random.

After the weekend the people in the group will file reports on what they saw. After the run of the experiment the results would be compiled, and the range and types of errors noted, as well as the relative accuracy.

This might be able to demonstrate to what degree a group of varied people would tend to misidentify a bear or a man as a bigfoot, or vice versa.

The bear of course would need to be a trained one.

Thoughts?

You’re on a planet in a far solar system. You’re a scientist, studying Earth; your specialty is these critters called primates, which contrary to all appearances, actually seem to be related to one another. An associate comes in your office one day and says, there’s another ape up there. You go, no way! There’s a game scientists like to play on your planet, so your associate doesn’t flat out tell you what the ape is like. He gives you two possibilites. (You know about all the nonhuman primates that happen to be recognized on Earth right now.) He gives detailed descriptions of both, and asks you to determine the more plausible of the two.

One of the possibilities described is homo sapiens; the other is the sasquatch. (And remember: for some reason, your planet knows nothing about homo sapiens. It’s almost like Earth that way.)

Which do you pick as the more plausible?

If you want to be seen as not being cuckoo, and don’t want to lose your goshrou;jla (your civilization’s word for “tenure”), you say, of course, the sasquatch. No-brainer.

Yes. That is how scientists work. Here on Earth too.

Regardless what you’ve said, scientists commonly recognize man as a primate, and an ape. rbhess went on at some length here about how the sas doesn’t fit any models of what we know to be real. Reason is: we either distort our models, or forget to include ourselves, when it comes to topics like this. Viewed with the full spectrum of possibilities, the sasquatch seems more than plausible. There is no way, knowing nothing about us, that an extraterrestrial observer would consider us a plausible primate, seeing the other ones on offer. But given us, well, the sas appears to fit right in.

The only problem with the magic act is (1) the “true” explanation is NOT simple and (2) there’s no evidence that anything like it happened. Whatever anyone wants to say about either Patty or the sasquatch in general: to the extent that evidence is available, the evidence points to the reality of the animal.

But you are right: people tend to get overly complicated when they are trying to explain away things that don’t fit their cherished models. Hence the huge reach that results in Pattyfake.

That may be why so many confuse me with a proponent. Your posts make it sound as if you were once a true believer who got disillusioned by seeing no proof. That seems to color your view of the evidence. I have never had that problem. As cool as the sas might be only one thing will convince me: evidence.

I am skeptical of any proposition in a scientific debate - which this clearly is - which is presented to me without evidence.

So far, that describes Pattyfake. The evidence can’t say Patterson was devious enough or deluded enough or greedy enough to do this. IT HAS TO SHOW HOW HE DID. Because all the other evidence says: he couldn’t.

Although I agree with mystery_man that Patty appears savaged beyond recovery, I believe that scientists perform a disservice to science when they reject a proposition with much evidence to support it, against which no effective counter has been offered.

THAT’S when I distrust scientists. When they fail to live up to science.

I have given some reasons in posts above why I do not think Patterson’s film is of a real Bigfoot.
Yet, like other skeptics, I will not rule it out absolutely. For the sake of argument, I have posed the question: if it is real, what is it?

I was attempting to look at Patterson’s Bigfoot with fresh eyes, to find something new to say about the image. I was trying to reconsider the image.

DWA- I appreciate your comments. I do have a problem with not distinguishing between apes and humans. I do think some evolutionists talk of such things as “the naked ape” when referring to humans, but I always took that as hyperbole aimed at those who do not accept that we are part of the animal kingdom and believe instead we are set apart from animals (the creationists).

You suggest everything about “Patty” is apelike. I beg to differ. If you found tracks like those made by Patterson’s Bigfoot (remember, I’m granting you the reality of “Patty” for sake of argument), but you had never heard of Bigfoot as popularly conceived, you would not look at the tracks and think, “my, what large ape tracks out here in the woods.” Instead, you would probably think, “good gravy, that is one big hombre.”

You suggest that several scientists have answered my concerns. But this seems to me to be an appeal to authority that is at odds with your often stated distrust of scientists. Be that as it may, one of the early advocates, Joseph Wraight, suggested Bigfoot was not implausible because “these creatures are more humanlike than apelike and they apparently migrated here” rather than evolve here.

Even those who try to link Bigfoot (or other Bigfoot like creatures) to Gigantopithecus admit in their own advocacy that such a link is “utterly hypothetical” (Heuvelmans on Gigantopithecus and the Yeti). I suggest that Bigfoot (and Patterson’s especially) is hard to explain and its professional advocates, such as Krantz and Meldrum, have leapt to the only explanation that they could possibly rationalize as relevant to Bigfoot accounts (Gigantopithecus as Bigfoot). And even if such an explanation is only an “utterly hypothetical” contemplation.

You suggest the Indian accounts of sasquatch are both real (not mere legend) and mistaken (the Indians believed the apes among them were human). You explain this by evoking the notion that they did not know of apes and pigeon-holed sasquatch as humans. I suggest that perhaps the professional advocates have perhaps pigeon-holed Bigfoot as an evolved ape because they have no clue otherwise as to how to explain the existence of such creatures.

By the way. If you reread the early accounts of Indians concerning sasquatch, you may be surprised to find that not only did they portray sasquatch as a race or tribe of giant Indians, but they also had encounters with sasquatch where the “apes” used human language.

Lyndon- Thanks for your comments. It seems that you are unwittingly making a case for Bigfoot as human rather than ape. You make several references to an ape who walks like a man, has buttocks like humans, upright gait like humans, and I presume feet far more resembling a human’s than an ape’s. Why not take the logical step and say that Patterson’s Bigfoot is more humanlike than apelike. And since I am granting the reality of Patterson’s Bigfoot (for sake of argument), what then can we learn from the film that would explicate the creature further if we take that stance?

What can we discern if we compare Bigfoot to the Yeti? Both large bipedal “apes”, right? Unless, you look at their tracks. One is apelike, but not like any known ape. The other is humanlike, but not like any known human.

And when we talk of prehistoric “dawn” men, we are not, strictly speaking, talking about apes.

I used to accept the Patterson film as legitimate. For years I would occasionally run across the film on TV or in my readings and I would marvel at it with a believer’s heart and a believer’s eyes. Alas, over time I grew more skeptical and began to see flaws in the creature represented and wondered about why the issue had not been laid to rest definitively, in the advocate’s favor, long ago.

I read Long’s book and it laid the film to rest for me. I was a bit whimsical after concluding, to my own satisfaction, Patterson had “punked” us all. Curiously, I felt as if I had lost a friend in Patterson’s Bigfoot; after all, she had been in my thoughts and dreams for decades. I wasn’t angry with Patterson, but the book presented an elementary investigation which impeached his veracity without doubt, and I did feel disappointed that the earlier investigators, Sanderson and Green, did not do what needed to be done back then to give us a credible account.

While some folks want to conclude that Patterson must have been part Edison and part Orson Welles to have pulled off such a hoax, I think the truth is much more modest, as truth often is. Patterson’s Bigfoot is like any magic act; folks have a tendency to try to over-explain what they see in a magic act. Almost always, they think the magic act is more complicated than it really is. They overlook the easy explanation and go instead to the complex explanation. Patterson’s Bigfoot was probably a guy in a home made costume, filmed at a distance, with capricious and advantageous lighting; a strolling man on a river bed, dressed in horse hair and a prefabricated gorilla suit, unique to place, time, and circumstance, and made more wondrous than it really is by hearts that want to believe and eyes that want to see.