How Many Normal (Relatively) Intelligent, Adult, Witnesses Without A Prior Agenda Does It Take To Have Any Provative Weight Towards The Unknown?

[dmaker]

^^ I understand where you're coming from DWA, but it seems that your position creates for you an endless treadmill. We haven't found Bigfoot yet because no one is seriously looking. So until you declare that the effort is of the appropriate level, your clock ticks indefinitely. And I strongly suspect the effort will never be strong enough or in the right places, etc, so that you will never have to budge from your position. As long as people are reporting Bigfoot sightings, you are going to remain steadfast in your position forever. 

 

Let me ask you something else. Is Bigfoot the only cryptid you follow? I've seen you on cryptomundo I think it was a few times. But that site is not just for Bigfoot as far as I understand. I'm just curious, I'm not trying to pick a fight or anything. 

Edited June 15, 2013 by dmaker

[Guest DWA]

Well, you are right about this:  as long as reports as compelling as what I'm reading now come in, and effort in the field is in my judgment inadequate, I can't consider the case closed.  There has to be significant movement toward obtaining a specimen with no specimen.  N'AWAC seems to be having lots of contact.  If that continues, even if they're unable to either shoot one or get good photo/video for what appear legit reasons, well, game still on.

 

I change the position when circumstances say I should.  To me it's not a function of simple passage of time but of enough effort in thee right places...for the right amount of time.  I'm not seeing amateurs doing that.  Other than NAWAC, nobody's even begun to come close other than the two amateurs who filmed Patty.  They got damned lucky...but put in the time, and the chances of that happening increase.

 

I consider yeti and orang pendek two other significant possibilities.  Outside of that, well...not really.  Not a large enough or consistent enough volume of evidence to make me too enthusiastic about any others.  Although I'd never tell people not to look.

[dmaker]

You believe Patty to be a Sasquatch and not a hoax?

[Guest DWA]

When I have seen quite a bit of evidence to make me think she's authentic (analyses by qualified people in both biological and costume fields; no ape costume ever that I've seen anything like it; anomalous tracks along the subject's line of travel that line up with tracks found elsewhere; my own gut; etc.)  and I can't conceive of P and G having done it, and nobody's shown me a believable scenario for their having been hoaxed...well, let's just say that if I were forced to bet money I'd have to bet it on Patty being real.

[MIB]

Me also.  

 

I've had the pleasure of meeting Bob Gimlin.   I detect no larceny and no hoaxing in his makeup.  

 

Further, the very best, well funded, attempts to replicate the limb proportions, gait, and create a believable costume fall so short of seeming like Patty that rather than debunk the PGF as intended, they support its authenticity. 

 

MIB

[Guest DWA]

VVVVThat too; and I've hung out with Gimlin; and if there were ever a Hall of Fame For Guys Who No Way Nohow Would Ever Be Involved In A Hoax...well, it would have to be named after him.

 

Spent a late morning/early afternoon walking around the Tyler, TX zoo with him at the 2009 Texas Bigfoot Conference.  He recounted that weekend.  It was a guy talking about stuff he did over the weekend; the story hasn't changed; and if my gut has ever led me right and it has too many times, he was saying what happened, not what we are supposed to believe happened.

Me also.  

 

I've had the pleasure of meeting Bob Gimlin.   I detect no larceny and no hoaxing in his makeup.  

 

Further, the very best, well funded, attempts to replicate the limb proportions, gait, and create a believable costume fall so short of seeming like Patty that rather than debunk the PGF as intended, they support its authenticity. 

 

MIB

(edited because whoops, page break!)

Edited June 15, 2013 by DWA

[dmaker]

I have seen some pretty convincing gait recreations on other forums and, if I recall correctly, in one documentary that Meldrum was also in. He doesn't comment on the gait recreation in that documentary. I do not believe the gait of Patty to be impossible to recreate as I have just mentioned. I do still, however, concede that the costume remains to be successfully challenged. So just based on that I also have to concede that the PGF and Patty as a whole remains non-debunked. I don't believe that it is impossible to do so, I just feel that no one has seriously tried in my opinion. Perhaps anyone with the expertise and resources to care enough to do so has not come forward and seriously tried. But that is mostly my opnion. Perhaps if Bill Munns gets his movie made, it may provoke some skeptical response from someone with the correct skills and resources. I would look forward to that response.

[MIB]

dmaker -

 

Doing it with today's equipment isn't good enough.  You have to figure out how to replicate it precisely with what was available when the film was made Oct 20, 1967.   You have to account for fooling Bob Gimlin since he wasn't in on any hoax.  You have to figure out how the hoaxers knew where Bob and Roger would be and how they got set up ahead of them.   You have to find someone able to do that, yet dumb enough to risk Bob's rifle.  That's my yardstick for acceptance of any "proof" of a hoax.

 

MIB

Edited June 16, 2013 by MIB

[dmaker]

I understand the yardstick. I still don't think that even constricted to what was available at the time precludes debunking the PGF. I have seen the apes in 2001 A Space Odyssey and the Planet of the Apes movies, so I am not at all convinced that the technology of the day precludes a hoax for the PGF. I remain confident that if someone actually cared enough to pick up the gauntlet and debunk the PGF, that it could be done. The problem, as I see it, is that no one actually cares about the PGF outside of the Bigfoot community. So it remains unchallenged simply because no one on the opposite side takes it seriously enough to bother with. Again, my opinion.

[MIB]

Are you forgetting the BBC's attempt?   They had budget.  They had actors, costume makers, the best the film industry had to offer was available to them.  They had the opportunity to make unlimited "takes" and only show us the most convincing.  They had a set agenda to debunk the PGF.   Yet in the end what they produced was cartoon-like.  What we call "epic fail."

 

And on the other hand, we have John Chambers, hollywood's best of the day, saying the costume, if it was one, was fractionally beyond his skill with the materials of the time and if he'd been able to do it, he'd have used the skill to win s' more awards, not donate it to a couple broke cowboys. 

[dmaker]

True enough, but still we find ourselves at this same old crossroads:

Got Monkey?

No? Where is the Monkey?

And I use that in the comical sense right now, but it's a very telling point: if the PGF is real, then where is the proof of it? Where is the animal?

Edited June 16, 2013 by dmaker

[dmaker]

You are also forgetting very convincing examples like 2001 and POTA..Both of those well, well, before the BBC attempt.

[Guest Llawgoch]

Me also.  

 

I've had the pleasure of meeting Bob Gimlin.   I detect no larceny and no hoaxing in his makeup.  

 

Further, the very best, well funded, attempts to replicate the limb proportions, gait, and create a believable costume fall so short of seeming like Patty that rather than debunk the PGF as intended, they support its authenticity. 

 

MIB

 

 

I'm not saying Bob Gimlin is a hoaxer, and I'm not saying he isn't.

What I will say is that successful con men are very plausible and do not appear to be liars.  That's why they are successful con men.

 

If Bob Gimlin was a hoaxer and collapsed into a fit of giggling whenever he spoke about the film, nobody would still have been talking about it six months after it was made.  I don't think anyone questions the fact that Gimlin is either a good liar, or honest.  Talking to him for a few hours isn't going to give you any insight further than that.

[Guest]

I never let my assumptions, bogeymen, etc. get in the way of what evidence is telling me.

You assume that people aren't willing to fabricate stories of bigfoot encounters, and this makes you far more open than me to accept anecdotal accounts as genuine. This is how the same evidence can tell us two different things.

 

I assume that if "bigfoot" is a flesh and blood animal native to North America as described, then it coexisted here for thousands of years with native peoples, through the European Colonial Period, and that remnants of its population remain with us today. I assume that it has no magical powers, but that it eats, poops, mates, nurses, grows, senesces, and dies like every other large mammal.  It is therefore extremely odd that no physical remnants of it have been collected as fossils, among Native American artifacts, among the pelts of fur trappers or market hunters, etc.  Like beavers, otters, fishers, mink, bears, cougars, wolves, coyotes, bison, moose, elk, and even White-tailed Deer, I would expect that bigfoots would've been hunted out of areas where they came in contact with white settlers (especially given the accounts of them raiding chicken coops, stealing salmon, competing with us for deer, etc.) and that some piece of one, from somewhere, would've survived long enough to have been described by the great natural historians of the 18th and 19th centuries. 

 

That's why I think if bigfoots were real we would've known for sure by 200 years ago.  The kind of lethal collection expedition you're talking about had already played out countless times in our nation's history, by settlers carving out their existence in the North American wilderness.  Bigfoots would've been shot as a matter of survival, out of fear, for sport, etc., just like all the other large mammals.

[MIB]

You are also forgetting very convincing examples like 2001 and POTA..Both of those well, well, before the BBC attempt.

 

No, not forgetting.    The POTA connection was rejected by John Chambers, the POTA suit creator, at the end of his life.   He said it was beyond him and if he could have, he'd have done it on screen for more awards, more money.   2001 is not compelling or believable, at least to my eye.  I didn't forget them, I dismiss them.   They are not even slightly convincing. 

 

And neither approximates Patty.  The best analysis to-date puts the Patty figure around 7 foot 4 inches and something around 600 pounds.   Account for that with a suit.  Account for it with a single "take."   Account for it while the actor in the suit is looking down the business end of a loaded rifle.