Creature Suit Analysis - Part 9 - A Study of Probability

[Guest duke of earl]

To be honest I almost missed your original 'statement' as I am now an infrequent reader/poster here. Only a certain feeling of 'deja vu' made me post a response at all. As a result, I'm not interested enough in your opinions of my posts to 'answer' you.

you said:

I may be misunderstanding you, but I think I have to respectfully disagree with you here - and I'll be the first to admit I once felt somewhat the same for a while whilst investigating this subject.

There is conclusive, verifiable evidence of the existence of humans disguised as fake animals in costumes going way back before this footage was shot. Some (not being date specific here) have fooled people into thinking they were real animals. Others have suspended disbelief, in clear footage, long enough to carry a story for a couple of hours or so. Others are laughable. Horses for courses though.

The materials & techniques to achieve this were available at the time of this footage - your valuable opinion (which I've enjoyed) as to their suitability & logistical application aside.

There is no conclusive evidence whatsoever that the figure in that footage is an unidentified species.

The default ergo should be that it's a guy in a suit until proven to be real. The desire, wish or urge to 'believe' does not or should not enter the equation.

I said:

That is one of the worst logic i have ever heard. Until the suit from the gods or the creature of god like intelligence shows up, its: INCONCLUSIVE.

Until better evidence suffices, the best explanation is currently non-existent

[Guest JohnWS]

I think subsequent posts in the Burden of Proof thread should have now made it clear to you why I'm not interested in your opinions.

[Guest duke of earl]

I think subsequent posts in the Burden of Proof thread should have now made it clear to you why I'm not interested in your opinions.

Ignorance?

[Guest RedRatSnake]

Hi

" O " Goody look who is back shooting up the forum again , Were ya been Duke ? ? ?

Peace

Tim

[Guest duke of earl]

Hi

" O " Goody look who is back shooting up the forum again , Were ya been Duke ? ? ?

Peace

Tim

Am i insulting anyone here? Because if i am, i apologize.

[Guest Carolina_Dog]

Am i insulting anyone here? Because if i am, i apologize.

See post 78.

[Guest duke of earl]

See post 78.

How is that insulting? I said ignorance because he said im not worthy of being responded to when i addressed his previous posts, and flawed them

[Guest RedRatSnake]

Hi

How is that insulting? I said ignorance because he said im not worthy of being responded to when i addressed his previous posts, and flawed them

I have not really done much communicating with ~ JohnWS ~ Since i came here cause he is a pretty serious guy and enjoys some good intellectual conversation at the table, Something i appreciate cause it keeps us all in the Know and firmly grounded,

So i can fully understand why he would not be interested in responding to your posts, After all you have very little to put on his plate to digest . . .

Peace

Tim

[Guest JohnWS]

What, you mean that 14 year-old troll who claimed to be a believer at JREF and a skeptic here? That guy needs serious professional help. Good thing he doesn't post here any more or I might get in trouble for insulting a member.

He's now doing his Harry Crumb routine as "duke of earl".

I am NOT makaya. I know of him, but im not him. You can believe whatever you want, i dont care, because im not a native like he is.

Who mentioned your other sock puppet makaya325 ?

You're being too obvious.

Oh dang, you busted yourself.

Duke of Earl, the above suspicions were ones I had too. I've seen Bluebear's posts and likewise been involved with Makaya's elsewhere. There is no fun or point in debating with someone 'Makaya-stylee'. It's just circular argument as there is no genuine wish to debate. Just rapid fire nay saying.

Tim - thanks :omg: . Serious? Ooer, I'd better do something silly .

[Guest duke of earl]

Duke of Earl, the above suspicions were ones I had too. I've seen Bluebear's posts and likewise been involved with Makaya's elsewhere. There is no fun or point in debating with someone 'Makaya-stylee'. It's just circular argument as there is no genuine wish to debate. Just rapid fire nay saying.

Tim - thanks :omg: . Serious? Ooer, I'd better do something silly .

Fine, believe whatever makes your world view comfortable

[Guest Tontar]

Bill,

First of all, I highly respect your efforts with regard to investigating the likelihood of Patty being a person in a suit. I think it is a fantastic study, and I thank you for embarking on it, and for having the experience and knowledge to back up what you come up with. But I have two basic comments about some of the things that have been said.

First of all, the probability exercise which continually compounded itself such that the likelihood of Patty being a man in a suit being one in so many thousand. I don't think I like the way that went. As the list grew longer, some of the items seemed to be less important, or less relevant to someone outside of Hollywood standards and practices. As in, just because you wouldn't likely do it that way i a Hollywood production, doesn't necessarily have anything at all to do with whether a rancher dude who wanted to make a hoax would even think about the standard way things are done in the industry. So I believe that the ever unfolding list of probability is artificially padded. I don't mean that as an insult, just as in if it were "me" wanting to pull off a hoax, it is likely that I would never have even considered some of the things that were used as evidence against it being a hoax.

For example, the idea of breasts. Most Hollywood suits were non-gender suits. So what, really. There were stories of female bigfoot creatures, we all know that there must be females to have babies and all. A well known drawing of one in books, and so on. Now if it were me, and I were wanting to make a convincing hoax, would I contrive it the way everyone would expect, or would I try to come up with something out of left field. As if a bigfoot itself was not out of left field enough. Why NOT make a suit with breasts. Obviously, if it was a suit, and the idea of breasts was used in order to add that extra authenticity, it worked wonders. Why assume that if one is going to make a hoax, they'd not think of details like that? So the whole breast thing is not something that I even think should be used as a reason to minimize the possibility of a hoaxed suit.

Along those lines, what about the Freeman footage? If you look at that, it looks like something big on the front. How do you raise the ante on a bigfoot with breasts? How about a bigfoot with a baby clutched to the breast? THAT would have been a way to toss another unexpected detail into the video to add improbability to the hoax claims. Or a branch, or a rabbit pelt, or some other sort of prop to add ambience or character to the creature.

If I were going to stage a hoax, and believe me I have thought about it just as I have thought about all manner of unspeakable things in my life, I would try to do it such that nobody could expose it as a hoax. I was totally into Hollywood makeup when I was a kid. Planet of the Apes, Trog, 2001, Altered States, and on and on. You industry giants and geniuses did a great service to all of us viewers, and because of all that I never thought it would be all that hard to make something pretty reasonably convincing were I sufficiently motivated to do so. I never was motivated enough then or now to fake a sighting, even more so now I think it would be wrong, but back then I was learning about sewing curved seams, shaping 3D shapes, padding with foam rubber that was available at the variety stores, and so on.

Occam's razor is a great tool when trying to figure out averages, and probabilities. But as we all know, everything does not follow the rules of probability as one might expect. Were Roger really wanting to pull off a great hoax to last indefinitely, I would think and I would hope that he would put enough thought into it that it would not follow the spontaneous rules of probability. That he would stop and think about things a bit more, and thinking about details and options would make the Occam's Razor predictions become less secure in predicting the outcome.

I can see a concversation going someting like this:

"Well, if we are going to do this creature suit, what will we need to do to make it believable. Something unique, something nobody would expect. Boobs! Yes, that would be a good one, nobody would expect that. And none of that fake caveman walking garbage either, that always looks so fake. Better to just walk normally, because a fake walk always looks fake. And we'll need a money shot, there's always got to be the one great money shot, so its got to look over while it's walking and give the eye to eye, looking into our soul look, like the oh yeah, you feeling lucky, are ya? That's it, exactly, you want a piece of me? And forget that extra long arm thing too, that looks so fake in the movies, long arm extensions like in King Kong versus Godzilla, those arms are so fake. So let's be more real, just a bit less human, a bit more ape. Too exaggerated will always look fake, so we get the suit, we glue on some hair in other places, like the hands and face, and we can chop and glue up a halloween mask to make something kind of between ape and human that will work great. Pull the hoodie on over it tight so it all looks like one piece..."

Breasts were not completely unknown in cinema. look at the Tropi in Skullduggery in 1970. They had breasts, mated with humans in fact, and shook the taboo world of human and animal division by having one get pregnant and all hell broke loose that these little hairy creatures were human. they even showed that in theaters, and with a GP rating.

[Guest Tontar]

Having said that I think that it is possible to have come up with the idea of a hoax, and avoid falling into all the improbable scenarios of Occam's razor, I'm not saying that I believe one way or the other. Patty may have been a hoax, and I don't really think it is that far from improbable or impossible. Or Patty may have been the real deal. I would like to believe that it was the real deal. I lean that way. I WANT to believe, but at the same time I am not at all convinced that the idea of a hoax is all that remote. Even given the excellent work to suggest it is improbable as a hoax, it very well could be a hoax and a well done one at that. just not done according to the "standard" methodology one might expect.

Keep up the good work.

Ah, and about doing the research on the film stock, recreating a piece of film to see what resolution was possible and if that same resolution was repeatable. What about finding a way to get the most high quality Patterson film, finding the original, getting Monsterquest to buy it form the lawyer type in Florida, and seeing what can be seen in that?

Aaron

[Bill]

Aaron (Tontar):

Thank you for your comments.

The exercise in probability is the most speculative of my analysis, and I believe somewhere in the notes, I mentioned that other people could set up their own list of things or criteria for probability and get different results.

So now, in retrospect, I would say this discussion was the most circumstantial of the ones I wrote about, and I've ceased to advocate the idea, preferring to try and focus on elements of the film that are more empirical, more factual and independent of any suspicion of bias or predisposition.

On the matters of the film itself and attemts to get to the beter versions, I am exploring that avenue now.

Bill

[Guest]

Bill,

*snip for space*

One factor you don't address that I do above if MONEY. A cutting-edge suit (and for it to look THAT good on film, it would have to be), would cost far more than a couple of backwoodsman/hunters like Patterson & Gimilin could afford.

The crude (and NOT resembling "Patty" at all) suit that Bob H describes in his "confession" is more the sort of thing P&G would have been able to afford on their own.

That implies yet ANOTHER accomplice, beyond the suit-maker, a "money man". No evidence of said money man has ever been adduced.

Still, if you look at the physiological data derived FROM the subject "Patty" in the actual film, MORE support for the "real crature" hypothesis occurs, as any suit, no matter how good, is only going to look as good as the person it is fitted to, and the ratio/porportion anomalies present make the chance of finding a living human being to meet them vanishingly small.

http://www.bigfootproject.org/articles/eval_sas_photos.html

However, in my view, an elementary probability analysis precludes the man in a suit hypothesis. Remember that the odds of a series of observations occurring can be computed by finding the product of the probabilities associated with each event. For example, the chance of flipping a coin and getting a tail is 0.5, or fifty percent. The probability of getting three tails in a row is 0.5 x 0.5 x 0.5 = 0.125, or twelve and a half percent. Similarly, probabilities can be assigned to the anthropometric data derived from an analysis of the Patterson/Gimlin film subject.

According to the Glickman analysis (and others), “Patty†stood over seven feet tall. The odds of an American man growing to 6? 8†are less than one in ten thousand (<0.0001); it is probably safe to assume that the odds of a man growing to 7?3†are less than one in a million. If “Patty†was a man in a suit, the hoaxers must have gone to great lengths to locate a man of that stature and to customize a costume for such a huge individual, but that is beside the point being developed here.

A skit repeated several times on Conan O?Brien?s late night television program illustrates with an absurd example the consequences of multiplying low probabilities. A black seven-foot-tall Groucho impersonator comes on stage declaring, “That?s the craziest thing I ever hoid!†Apparently, few viewers understood the joke, but, as O?Brien pointed out, the number of exceedingly tall black men who impersonate Groucho Marx is very small. Calculating the number of members in the black seven-foot-tall Groucho impersonating fraternity would require some obscure probabilities, to say the least. However, for the sake of argument, let?s say that black males comprise 0.06 (six percent) of the American population and that 0.0001 of them are seven feet tall. If 0.01 estimates the percentage of Groucho fans among African American men, and 0.1 of them sometimes impersonate Groucho, then we should expect that, from an overall population of 300,000,000 in the U.S., approximately two individuals meet the criteria.

Fortunately, examining body proportions does not require the use of esoteric percentages or abstract speculation.

Humans exhibit characteristic ratios of body segment lengths as compared with height (H). For example, for the North American population, 0.285H is the average ground to knee distance, 0.152H estimates foot length, and so on (Perissinotti 2000). Multiplying my height of sixty-eight inches times 0.152 produces a foot length estimate of about ten and one third inches, which is right on target for my feet. It is important to note that these physical characteristics are not necessarily correlated. For example, a man who is taller than 95 percent of the population is not necessarily at the 95 percentile in arm length and other characteristics (Perissinotti 2000). Of course, as with nearly all body measures (weight being an exception), data collected from a population present a normal, or bell-shaped, distribution. Most measures fall around the average; the odds of measures falling significantly above or below the average can be predicted, as in the example of a man growing to be 6? 8†tall.

Incidentally, according to the scale for North Americans, one would predict a height of approximately 7? 11†for “Patty†based on the size of her feet. If the 7? 3†estimate is close to the actual height, a conversion factor of 0.167H (instead of 0.152H) would predict sasquatch foot length. Conversely, dividing foot length (or print/cast length) by 0.167 would predict height in inches. This compares with a value of 0.165 computed by Fahrenbach from a much larger sample size, although he argued that the data supported a non-linear interpretation (Fahrenbach 1997-1998).

In addition to height, other “Patty†parameters appear to be well outside the norm. For example, Glickman compared arm length with height. Since this produced a ratio, the value was independent of actual height. In other words, the same ratio would have resulted if “Patty†stood 6?3†or 7?3†because the comparison involved relative measures. The arm/height ratio of the Patterson/Gimlin subject (long arms compared to height) was far outside the human norm and would be expected in only one out of every 52,500,000 people. (As has been noted by Glickman and others, the fact that hand flexion is documented in the Patterson/Gimlin film precludes the possibility that prosthetics were used to hoax a long arm effect.) The leg length/height ratio (short legs compared to height) was also unusual and would be expected in only one out of 1000 people (Glickman 1998). This set of ratios is more typical of the great apes, which possess longer arms than legs, rather than humans, where the reverse is the norm.

Multiplying the three probabilities presented above provides a way of estimating the odds of a human displaying the set of body measures observed in the Bluff Creek subject. For the sake of producing a conservative estimate, I will use 0.0001 for the height probability, 0.0000001 (less than one fifth the value published by Glickman) for the arm/height probability, and 0.001 for the leg/height probability. The product of those probabilities is 0.00000000000001, or one in one hundred trillion. A thousand galaxies comparable to the Milky Way would contain one hundred trillion stars. The most logical explanation for why “Patty†displayed such an apparently radical set of human morphological characteristics is that she was not human.

Edited March 30, 2009 by Mulder

[Guest Tontar]

Remember when bumblebees were supposed to be scientifically unable to fly? BUt still they flew. There are always improbabilities that find contradictions in reality. I am NOT trying to disprove the existence of bogfoot, or claim Patty was a hoax. All I am saying is that it is still possible it was a hoax, even in the face of whatever probability may be presented. I prefer to believe Patty was a real creature. I do, I prefer that, and I tend to lean that way. However, I am not so convinced as to say that it WAS a real creature. I have to leave room for doubt and for the possibility that Patterson pulled off a good one on many millions of people.

If evidence comes to light which ends up illuminating the fact that it WAS a hoax, if Mr's Patterson produces the suit, or the mask, or the plan, or something, or Bob Gimlim finally decides to fess up, where does that leave all the theories which say it was not at all very probable that it was a hoax. I can see some people calling the hoaxers liars, not wanting to believe it was a hoax, and not accepting that it even could be after all these years and all these layers of dedicated thought to prove it could not possibly be a hoax.

If we eliminate all possibility and probability that it was a hoax, if it does turn out that it was a hoax, what happens then? I want to reserve the right to not have had the joke played on me too convincingly, that's all.