Saying that “We don’t really know what a REAL one looks like” is perhaps not exactly the way I would put it. In cases of Cryptozoology, what we are generally going on is consensus of best evidence. Some of the tracks are very convincing and they are also consistent: other look different and are more puzzling.

Napier wrote in his book Bigfoot (1972) that the Sasquatch tracks seem to come in two types, the double-ball-of-the-foot-all-toes-like-peas-in-a-pod-hourglass prints and the more humanlike ones. Krantz made a good case for the more humanlike kinds, and showed that the bony anatomy is actually inhuman. He also allowed that both of Napier’s types were ends of a range of variation.

I had subsequently learned (much to my surprise) that the ‘double-ball-of-the-foot’ tracks are due to the foot’s clenching the toes in certain soils, and that the same toes can spread widely in other tracks in the same sequence. This is unexpected and certainly inhuman. If I were to describe the West Coast Sasquatch tracks’ bony anatomy, I would not do much better than a friend of mine in simplifying my case during a debate did. He said that the toes I was describing were like gorilla toes arranged as in a human foot, not structured like human toes, but leaving tracks resembling those of humans when the soil determines that they use their feet in a certain way.

And Patty’s feet actually look pretty well near the norm of what is reported, besides looking like the tracks ascribed to the site. I did some measuring of frame blowups and the measurements match the tracks, assuming the size Krantz determined.

I think too many Bigfooters have been giving themselves too many strokes with a wet noodle, given that I’m not aware of any debunking that HASN’T been done by a Bigfooter. (They’re the only ones who have seen enough trackways to know, right?)

There are just bad apples in the barrel, and no one should get snookered out of hand by a bad apple – particularly since there’s no consensus, really, on what a GOOD apple looks like. Which you can only get with scientific verification of the animal.

In some ways that’s true: there aren’t many important cryptozoological cases in which the possibility of hoaxing can be definitively excluded, so we really should be cautious about all of them. After all, we know hoaxing goes on (and lots of it!); we only hope that other cases result from undiscovered animals.

But that’s a bit of a different issue than the two points I was making:

1) If the possibility of hoaxing is suggested especially strongly by the available information in a given case, then it’s responsible to make a special effort to set aside that case in particular. For example, if the evidence was “discovered” by a person (or one of their close associates) known to have hoaxed Bigfoot evidence in other instances (as has been true in several well-known cases), that’s an awfully bad sign. In such a case, talk that sidesteps the obvious likelihood of a hoax should make cryptozoologists cringe.

It’s pretty basic stuff, it seems to me. I’d be a fool to accept a hundred dollar bill from a known counterfeiter. Or, if we discovered that a police detective had planted evidence in one case, all her other convictions would be instantly thrown into doubt. They would all have to be critically reexamined.

2) In such cases, failing to proactively make that quarantining effort is (among other things), a catastrophic PR blunder. If the police and DA failed to reexamine the other possibly-tainted cases in the planted evidence example above, there’d be a huge outcry, and for good reason.

Business as usual in the face of the possibility of fake evidence sends a strong message that the investigators don’t care about the truth (or aren’t qualified to find it). Even if that perception is mistaken, it would be unrealistic for the investigators to expect to be taken seriously in the future.

Poilice in Los Angeles received thousands of ‘confessions’ to the murder of The Black Dalia, for example, and ALL of them were false reports.

In this case, the argument for hoaxing these tracks seem pretty certain and the next step is simply that the tracks in question are fakes, must be recognised as such and watched out for in the future. My brother just now looked over my shoulder when the photo came up and asid ‘those are fakes’ even without knowing anything else about the crack in the heel. Several ‘Bigfoot’ track casts you see come from faked trails, but others are different. They look different to an observer mostly in that flexing of the foot and spreading or clenching of the toes are clearly seen. This means that there is usually some variation on the individual tracks.

As far as I can see, Patty is the genuine article and the cast tracks attributed to her do represent her feet as shown. There also is a variation in the casts of her tracks. The muscles in her arms and legs can be seen to flex in the movie. Krantz’s analysis of the film is convincing to me and so are his comments on Bigfoot foot anatomy as told from the track casts.

If there’s **any evidence suggestive of hoaxing in any given case, the only responsible response is to quarantine that case from the dataset** until such time as hoaxing can be definitively ruled out. If a sasquatch case is kept in the mix after strongly suggestive and widely publicized evidence of hoaxing in that case emerges, that constitutes a kind of willful self-destruction on the part of researchers. Not to put too fine a point on it, but retaining compromised cases makes the entire topic appear ridiculous.

That, in turn, makes things harder on those people who see strange things, those who might come forward with unusual reports.

I definitely think that someone with a high stake in Being Believed could start creating hoaxes when people pooh-poohed his genuine experiences.

I’ve also never heard of any convincing evidence that Wallace actually made many fake tracks, other than people’s word for it. Did he cast his own fake tracks or take pictures? If he went to all the trouble, why not?

Also, when reading the early 1958 accounts from the newspapers, he sounded annoyed at losing quality tractor operators. So, I guess the fix was in right from the start and he had some great cover planned…or “real” tracks started him hoaxing?

Just my 2¢

tirademan