But the fact is we dont know whether it was fake or not (whatever we might suspect). A such, the fact that there is a resemblance carries exactly the same weight for the argument that it might have been faked as it does for the argument that it wasn’t (it is entirely consistent with both).

Unless we have presupposed the answer to the q of whether bf exists (one way or the other), the weight we give the resemblance in our reasoning should be, in fact, precisely none.

I have found it quite amazing how some very detailed claims have been discarded by a group, simply because there is one single element that the majority does not buy. This is a very short-sighted investigatory method and everyone should be aware of the hazards. We also should be open-minded enough to recognize that we don’t understand everything on this earth, and that maybe some things can’t be explained by what we do know. If the opposite were the case, we’d have the sasquatch mystery all wrapped up long ago.

Patty is/was a real living breathing female sasquatch. Anything similar between Roe and Patty is mere coincidence, that’s all. If Patty were a guy in a suit, then they must have made a male version too that walked across the road after midnight 15 miles or so inside the southern entrance of Yosemite National Park from Mariposa some 10 years later. And believe me, he would have to have been one big dude in that suit. Muscular legs larger than my then 32″ waist. Not to mention he would need to be fearless to be walking around in pitch dark in steep country, and where bears regularly weigh ober 450 lbs.

Patty is the real thing, that is my testimony only as someone who has seen these creatures close up and personal. Take it or leave it, it’s your prerogative.

And Ostman ain’t in MY database. He’s like Ray Wallace: trouble, if you’re a proponent, and better left out of the conversation.

The vast majority of sas encounter reports read like real wildlife encounters.

If the Roe case was bogus, then that would cast serious doubt on the Patterson-Gimlin film. Now, in fact there is no positive evidence that the Roe case was fake, but there is plenty of reason for caution: the only evidence for (or against) Roe’s report is his word, and that is of unknown value because (as I’ve written elsewhere) no Bigfooter ever spoke to Roe. Nobody questioned Roe in person, spoke to him on the phone, visited the site, or even looked Roe in the face. We know almost nothing about Roe. We don’t even have the original telling of his tale, which appeared in some British Columbia media outlet (newspaper? radio?) but has since been lost. That doesn’t mean the Roe sketch was not based on a real animal sighting—but frankly, no one knows that it was.

If it should be the case in the future that evidence falsifying the Roe story ever does emerge, the Patterson film will also be seriously damaged.

On the other hand, if the Patterson film is a fake (I am persuaded that it is, but we all know the arguments, and I won’t repeat them here), then the Roe sketch certainly does “suggest itself most strongly as Patterson’s inspiration,” regardless of whether the Roe case was genuine or not. As UKCryptid puts it above, that is one hell of a coincidence. (That artistic relationship would interesting, at least to skeptics, because one of our functions is to act as historians of hoaxes and scams.)

That said, many posters here make the point that the similarity between the eyewitness evidence of Roe and the film evidence from Patterson is equally consistent with the hypothesis that both are accurate representations of the same species of undiscovered primate. This is of course correct—by themselves, these two pieces of evidence are consistent with several scenarios, and the sasquatch hypothesis is one of them.

Here’s a dose of same: Roe saw a female sasquatch. Twelve years later, so did Patterson. He had a camera.