Thousands of sightings, countless novels (the best is Eric Penz' Cryptid: here's an interview with the author) probably dozens of movies and equally fictitious YouTube "documentations," con artists, hoaxers, sincere monster-hunters, cryptozoologists, eyewitnesses, and plain folks have been part of this business for over 60 years now.
There's no physical evidence of Bigfoot that has been scientifically verified, but no one doubts the best chance the Big Guy had for widespread recognition was when Roger Patterson and Bob Gimlin filmed Bigfoot or something that certainly looked like it in California in 1967. Patterson died without ever hinting at a hoax, and Gimlin swears by the tale to this day, but what's actually in the frame?
I'd bet "suit:" it looks baggier the more versions I see of it, and 52 years without anything remotely as intriguing is too much for me. I don't know who hoaxed who and who might be telling the truth and who might be lying, but I don't like it as an unknown primate.
This comes up now because of a lot of discussion over a YouTube video where a man signing himself "Bigfoot Al" has used modern software to smooth out the film and give us a better look at our creature. Now, the troujble with enhancing or enlarging this beastie is that it was shot on 16mm film and the image is 1.8mm high. there's a limit to what you can do because there is limited data captured on the film. People get fooled by TV shows where grainy surveillance footage is sharpened up to reveal details like scars that were not on the original footage.) Anyway, this effort doesn't make it any better for me: indeed, it looks lumpier, less well-defined, and thus more like a suit. It always bothered a lot of viewers that the bottom of the foot was lighter in color than the rest of the fur or skin, not known to happen with apes: here it's more apparent.
One commenter on a FaceBook thread remarked the PG suit (it it is one) looks better than the suits created by John Chambers for the movie Planet of the Apes, which were the pinnacle of spe-suit wizardry at that time. That overlooks the facts, though: the Apes suits were filmed with the highest-definition professional cameras and most skillful cameramen available and included close-up shots, all projected on huge screens: of course you could pick out flaws if you looked for them. If you shot one of those suits at the distance of the PG film with a 1967 16mm hand-held and the lens Patterson had, I'm sure it would look at least as convincing, probably a lot more so. That's the experiment I'd like to see: take one of the more distant ape shots from the Planet film and degrade it to what Patterson's camera could pick up at that range, then put it side by side.
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Id the film definitively, once and for all, disproven? No, because it can't be, unless maybe someone fiunds a picture of a man putting on a suit. But we are close to it, and in any event that's not where the burden of proof lies. It looks more to me like a suit in the various enlargements and enhancements, but I can't see a zipper pull (which ,if it existed, would likely be smaller than a spot of emulsion grain and thus undetectable anyway).
I hope Bigfoot is out there. And maybe it's best if we never find out.
2 comments:
For me curiously what killed my belief in bigfoot was a 2 step process. 1st, there was simply too much low quality evidence and a lack of anything high quality. Bigfoot lives in every state, in every environment etc, but we cant get a body or even a quality photo. Thats a sociological phenomenon not a biological one. the 2nd hit was the explosion of cheap game cameras all over the country, and the complete goose egg of decent shots of a bigfoot.
That's a challenge, too. If we have a real unknown species, it's going to be where both sightings and cover are good, the PNW, with possible allowances for a few small outlying groups. But there are thousands of sightings from all over the country: it's pretty hard to filter those and say a sighting from Oregon is probably good while a sighting of equal quality from Virginia isn't.
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