This is a definite hoax.

I’m sorry but this statement just kind of invalidates the whole thing for me right off the bat. Obviously the BFRO believes in Bigfoot, but to approach a video and claim some sort of authenticity because you know what Bigfoot looks like in real life is just so unacceptably uncritical. They’re not even trying to pretend to be skeptical. Wouldn’t the best analysis of a video come from someone who didn’t already believe that Bigfoot existed, let alone that it is a survivor of the gigantopithecus line of apes? By the same logic, just because I claim to have seen the Easter Bunny hopping around my back yard, I can tell that photo/video documentary evidence of something that looks like the Easter Bunny is genuine because, “It looks like what I saw.” I never saw the BFRO as an impartial source, but I can’t help but see this as an obvious example of the availability heuristic fallacy, in which people estimate the probability of an outcome based on how easy that outcome is to imagine.

Problematic at best, total hoax at the worst.

The main thing which discredits it to me is how the cameraman zooms completely in on the creature before it goes out of sight - so much that the footage ends in a complete blurr. On the surface this is not particularly strange, but considering how close this creature apparently was to the cameraman - about 40? feet - I just have to ask myself WHY would anyone zoom-in AT ALL unless they were afraid of picking-up too many details of the ape costume? Plus all of the tall grass hiding the details of the “creature” just seems suspicious to me - AND how it walks to the left and then back to the right. Does he think he is a squirrel or something?

What made the Patterson Bluff Creek footage so amazing to me is two things:

1) How it gives that hard to describe “gut impression” that we are looking at a real, living creature.

2) How the cameraman “pursued” the Bigfoot in an attempt at getting as much and as clear of footage as he could before the once-in-a-lifetime encounter was over; trying to steady the camera and being sure it was in focus and stayed in focus.

In contrast, the “Sonoma” footage looks like it is afraid of filming too much, and zooms in at the end in almost a “maybe this will look like I was really nervous” way. Also, the “creature” looks more like a skinny human in an ape costume than the robust, muscular, and fatty Patterson creature.

Yes, I suppose a starving Bigfoot would be skinny too, but the important comparison to keep in mind is this: It would be much more difficult to get someone big enough to “fill” and “carry” the suit required at the Bluff Creek sighting than the human-sized “Sonoma” encounter.