They can in my opinion, which is impervious to yours. Yours is fully valid for you, but it cannot control mine.

🤔   Do creatures leave tracks when they walk? Yes.   At some point? You have to invoke Occam’s razor.    You can’t make the stomper trackway first because it may show up in the film. So the costume goes first and then you have to rake out all the costume tracks and then go a second time with the stompers. Unless the costume person was wearing stompers and did it all in one go. Which is unrealistic. Wearing big heavy stompers a person would notice in the film. But raking out an entire creek bed seems unrealistic as well.   The simplest explanation is to take the film at face value. A large heavy creature walked across that sandbar. It was filmed doing so and its resulting trackway was cast.   The other supporting evidence is the mid tarsal break. It’s evidence of a living foot and not a stomper. And in 1967 no one knew what a mid tarsal break was. It was championed much later by Meldrum. And as far as he is concerned? The film shows the anatomy of a flexible foot that is creating the mid tarsal break as Patty walked in real time on the film.   So I say the trackway ABSOLUTELY supports the film and the film supports the trackway. To say otherwise is disingenuous unless the person is suggesting Patty floated across the sand bar with gravity booties.   Of course again with the required caveat that none of this matters to science……. If Bob Gimlin had shot Patty in 1967? Science would have the foot instead of the cast and all of this would be moot. But here we are.

No, the footprint casts can't be used as evidence to support the PGF because there is no continuous film showing that those footprints were made by Patty. Even if those footprints were genuine(made by an actual bigfoot), that doesn't necessarily mean that they were made by Patty. It could be that Patty was actually just a person in a costume, but those tracks were made by an actual bigfoot. It could be that Patterson and Gimlin faked those tracks, but Patty was real. The point is, those tracks can't be used as evidence for Patty being a real Bigfoot because there's no film footage to show that they're connected. And any reasons can be given as to why there's no footage of Patty being the one that actually made those footprints, but they're all irrelevant. It doesn't matter whether you like this or not, that's just how evidence works.     However, the footprints CAN be used against some claims, regarding Patty. I posted a link in the PGF section of this forum that demonstrates how it can be used to do that.

Sounds like a great time!