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The Patterson-Gimlin Bigfoot Film

One thing I especially like about this forum compared to others I've browsed over the years is the lack of visible smart-alec, destructive glee in the more sceptical members. On some boards I've read, a person only has to start a thread about something 'Fortean' for the subject to be near-instantly dismissed as fantasy/unscientific/completely unproven/supposedly evident immaturity on the part of the OP & others. That offensive aura of 'I know best, whereas you are a mere child. Or a liar' doesn't seem to exist here, thankfully.
 
kamalktk said:
However, few of those square miles are far away from humanity. The most remote you can be from a road in the continental US is 21.7 miles from a road. However that spot itself is less than a mile from a trail.

""We were sitting in the Wyoming remote spot, and there was a cabin five-tenths of a mile away," says Ryan.
......
In Idaho they saw a light aircraft within two miles of the remote spot. In Montana they met hunters. In New York and New Mexico, there were rangers' cabins."
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The farthest point from a tarmac road in the UK is less than 5 miles. There are ~11,000 otters in the UK. They are roughly 5 to 6 feet long. How many otters has the average person seen in the wild?

maximus otter
 
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The average adult otter I have seen is maybe 3 1/2 feet long?
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maximus otter said:
The farthest point from a tarmac road in the UK is less than 5 miles. There are ~11,000 otters in the UK. They are roughly 5 to 6 feet long. How many otters has the average person seen in the wild?

maximus otter
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Great point well made.

Also "tarmac road" includes miles upon miles of rural back roads with grass growing down the middle and no bridges over fords etc that are miles from the nearest town and see only the occasional vehicles. Take the county of Devon as an example, I've walked along such roads in Devon and for those who don't know the county it resembles France in shape i.e. a broad landmass with two separate coastlines and at 8,000 miles has the largest road network in England:

https://www.devon.gov.uk/roads-and-transport/traffic-information/#:~:text=Devon has over 8,000 miles,road network in the country.

Devon also boast two National Parks and areas like the north-west of the country that are truly rural in the sense of low population density and minimal light pollution. If big cats or any other cryptid were to be witnessed in these parts it would most likely be kept within the local community unless there were serious predations of livestock, as happened in the rural north of the country during the late 1970s/early 1980s and the subsequent media hysteria about the 'Best of Exmoor'.

My point? Beyond the major cities, towns and transport arteries Britain is rural:

"Rural areas cover the majority of the UK’s landmass. However, this proportion varies between the different countries within the UK. For example, rural areas make up 90 percent of England, while they make up 98% of Scotland."

https://lordslibrary.parliament.uk/fact-file-rural-economy/#:~:text=How much of the UK,make up 98% of Scotland.

... and connected by miles of rural roads, many of which are single carriageways that receive little maintenance. So, just because some thing happened "near a tarmac road" doesn't mean it happened in a populated area. Oh, and I've seen otter prints but only one otter in the flesh and that was a fleeting glimpse in torchlight and I used to live close to a river populated by them.
 
Steven said:
One thing I especially like about this forum compared to others I've browsed over the years is the lack of visible smart-alec, destructive glee in the more sceptical members. On some boards I've read, a person only has to start a thread about something 'Fortean' for the subject to be near-instantly dismissed as fantasy/unscientific/completely unproven/supposedly evident immaturity on the part of the OP & others. That offensive aura of 'I know best, whereas you are a mere child. Or a liar' doesn't seem to exist here, thankfully.
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Speaking as someone in the more sceptical end of Forteanism, I find the biggest problem with many sceptical commentators (and particularly with the average internet sceptic) is that they have nothing interesting to say about human experience.

And whatever you think about various Fortean phenomena, humans have some pretty damn interesting experiences.
 
BS3 said:
Speaking as someone in the more sceptical end of Forteanism, I find the biggest problem with many sceptical commentators (and particularly with the average internet sceptic) is that they have nothing interesting to say about human experience.

And whatever you think about various Fortean phenomena, humans have some pretty damn interesting experiences.
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Agreed, I quite often pop over to Metabunk if I'm looking into a certain UFO sighting and there are some scientifically accomplished people on there but crikey it is lacking in emotional intelligence.
 
I apologise to anybody that I may have pissed off.
I probably didn't express myself very well.
(I work in a shop you see)
 
maximus otter said:
The farthest point from a tarmac road in the UK is less than 5 miles. There are ~11,000 otters in the UK. They are roughly 5 to 6 feet long. How many otters has the average person seen in the wild?

maximus otter
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True, but how many people would find sighting an otter newsworthy to report it to authorities? And there are plenty of clear pictures of otters as well. An 7-8 foot tall bipedal ape is newsworthy.

I don't buy the theory that Bigfoot appears to remote communities and they just don't talk about it to outsiders. We already have an example of a cryptid appearing to a remote community and what will happen, eg the Mothman. And I don't think there's really any communities that are out of the reach of all the tv shows and internet about Bigfoot. A Bigfoot would be big money for these places.

Back to my initial point, a physical Bigfoot creature would need a lot more food than an otter. This impacts the required range needed to support a single creature, much less a sustainable population. While there's a lot of forest, and some of it remote, it's not so remote as to really be "untouched by humans", as evidenced by the maintained road near the Patterson-Gimlin film site. It's not New York Times Square, but there is enough human activity present in the area there is a road. It's extremely likely any livable range for a Bigfoot would have to cross roads, and thus intersect with human activity. The end result is there's just not that many places for a Bigfoot to hide.
 
kamalktk said:
However, few of those square miles are far away from humanity. The most remote you can be from a road in the continental US is 21.7 miles from a road. However that spot itself is less than a mile from a trail.

""We were sitting in the Wyoming remote spot, and there was a cabin five-tenths of a mile away," says Ryan.
......
In Idaho they saw a light aircraft within two miles of the remote spot. In Montana they met hunters. In New York and New Mexico, there were rangers' cabins."
Click to expand...

That's testament to how many roads the US has, it's also a little deceptive, many of those will be far from housing and even further from towns and many will be unsealed and seldom used.
 
Ogdred Weary said:
That's testament to how many roads the US has, it's also a little deceptive, many of those will be far from housing and even further from towns and many will be unsealed and seldom used.
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Yes, for instance the road next to the film location is a dirt road, it's not a highway. However its presence means there is enough human activity nearby to have a maintained road through the forest there.
 
There is a very long detailed article in Wikipedia giving pros and cons.

Something I missed over the years is Kodachrome II was new at the time and not many places could develop this type of film. It was never explained where the film was developed.

A speed for the film was 16 or 18 and not the normal 24 frames per second.

Then Disney studios who were pro argued with MGM who were con because they had people dress as apes because they were filming 2001–A Space Odyssey——-a little strange.
 
And to be honest, it just holds on that one frame and doesn’t explore things in other frames like the nap of the fabric flipped across the shoulders catching the light differently or the plimsole effect of the soles of the feet of a creature supposedly treading that path continuously in the wild. Also, apes rarely have hairy breasts.
 
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From the CFZ:

"Here we have the first of a two-part interview with MK Davis, which may well be the most important show that we have ever broadcast. I have never really heard of him before, but he is an engaging and fascinating interviewee, who knows – and has found out – stuff about the 1967 Patterson Gimlin footage of a Sasquatch at Bluff Creek in Northern California, which will truly horrify you.Unusually, I am issuing a trigger warning that some of the stuff and one or two of the images in the show may be upsetting, or cause stress. They certainly upset me . JD"


Part Two:

"Here we have the second of a two-part interview with MK Davis, which may well be the most important show that we have ever broadcast. I have never really heard of him before, but he is an engaging and fascinating interviewee, who knows – and has found out – stuff about the 1967 Patterson Gimlin footage of a Sasquatch at Bluff Creek in Northern California, which will truly horrify you.Unusually, I am issuing a trigger warning that some of the stuff and one or two of the images in the show may be upsetting, or cause stress. They certainly upset me . JD"


As a follower of the CFZ's work I don't wish to be rude but I wish this chap Davis would just get to the point of what he is claiming rather than going around the houses
 
maximus otter said:
There are ~11,000 otters in the UK. They are roughly 5 to 6 feet long. How many otters has the average person seen in the wild?
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The river Brain runs through my town and we now have a family of otters living in the middle of town, but they seem to stick to a fairly secluded area of the river which sits behind some dense trees and thick vegetation. We also have a family of otters where the Brain meets the Blackwater, outside of the town and in a nature reserve.

I haven’t seen either of these otter families but the gardeners responsible for the upkeep see them quite frequently, and other dog walkers have reported seeing them.

I would love to see the otters…otters make me happy.
 
You'll see a fair few otters if you hang about in places otters live. I've seen them frequently on the Norfolk Broads. As well as having to clean stinky spraint from the deck of the boat in the mornings.

Many Americans love to hike. I don't think there'd be any doubt of the existence of sasquatches were they real.

Absence of evidence is absolutely evidence of absence if you can predict the likely evidence one would expect to find. It's not proof, but it's evidence.
 
Tempest63 said:
The river Brain runs through my town and we now have a family of otters living in the middle of town, but they seem to stick to a fairly secluded area of the river which sits behind some dense trees and thick vegetation. We also have a family of otters where the Brain meets the Blackwater, outside of the town and in a nature reserve.

I haven’t seen either of these otter families but the gardeners responsible for the upkeep see them quite frequently, and other dog walkers have reported seeing them.

I would love to see the otters…otters make me happy.
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Go at night with a decent torch and you will have a good chance of catching sight of them as they chase fish. Look under bridges and the deeper pools.

One of the great success stories of British conservation considering they were once on the brink of extinction back in the 1970s.
 
PeteByrdie said:
You'll see a fair few otters if you hang about in places otters live. I've seen them frequently on the Norfolk Broads. As well as having to clean stinky spraint from the deck of the boat in the mornings.

Many Americans love to hike. I don't think there'd be any doubt of the existence of sasquatches were they real.

Absence of evidence is absolutely evidence of absence if you can predict the likely evidence one would expect to find. It's not proof, but it's evidence.
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Every single day that goes by without a Bigfoot is more evidence they don't exist.

I was reading a book quoting Bigfooters from the 1970s including Peter Byrne. They were convinced they were only a year or two away from getting one scientifically pinned down. Yet, they died without realizing their life's goal. 50 years later, here we still are. Looking. Hoping.
 
Sharon Hill said:
Every single day that goes by without a Bigfoot is more evidence they don't exist.

I was reading a book quoting Bigfooters from the 1970s including Peter Byrne. They were convinced they were only a year or two away from getting one scientifically pinned down. Yet, they died without realizing their life's goal. 50 years later, here we still are. Looking. Hoping.
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Parallels with Ufology there, I remember back in the 1970s with all those silver-suited humanoids and their solid, metallic craft it seemed like first contact was imminent.

47 years later...

Bigfoot has now become folklore and I am sure the subject of future studies into our belief systems. The Patty film remains unexplained but otherwise actual evidence since then has been lacking. There are the many eyewitnesses but many of these will have been mistaken. These creatures are described as being massive and must be packing in the calories but there never seems to be any evidence of them having foraged for food or finds of discarded fish and animal remains. What really interests me are the many reports of Bigfoot-type creatures in connection with lights in the sky/UFO sightings and other paranormal activity. Personally I do feel there is a paranormal element to all of this.
 
I have heard a lot of Bigfoot stories and they can more or less be divided into two camps.

1. An unexpected glimpse of Something in the forest. They may or may not be a fuzzy and indistinct photo to go along with it which does nothing to help with proof.

2. Bigfoot comes round to my house all the time, looks in my window and sits out the front eating the apples off my tree (or similar frequent, reliable behaviour). I have never ever got a photo of any of this.
 
Min Bannister said:
I have heard a lot of Bigfoot stories and they can more or less be divided into two camps.

1. An unexpected glimpse of Something in the forest. They may or may not be a fuzzy and indistinct photo to go along with it which does nothing to help with proof.

2. Bigfoot comes round to my house all the time, looks in my window and sits out the front eating the apples off my tree (or similar frequent, reliable behaviour). I have never ever got a photo of any of this.
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Todd Standing will take anyone out for Bigfoot encounters,I think he charges $5000 for a couple of days in the wilderness?
 
Min Bannister said:
I have heard a lot of Bigfoot stories and they can more or less be divided into two camps.

1. An unexpected glimpse of Something in the forest. They may or may not be a fuzzy and indistinct photo to go along with it which does nothing to help with proof.

2. Bigfoot comes round to my house all the time, looks in my window and sits out the front eating the apples off my tree (or similar frequent, reliable behaviour). I have never ever got a photo of any of this.
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Made me laugh and rather a strong element of truth to it. Some of the Bigfoot crowd are completely delusional but there is some good research going on, too. I had high hopes for the Olympic Project but in the latest documentary they featured in it had all become a bit too much about the people themselves and not the actual creatures..

When it comes to Bigfoot I am much more interested in the Beast of Whitehall-type events where a creature seemingly manifests in an area and causes mayhem, events build to a climax and then said creature seems to vanish. @lordmongrove has talked of this cryptid 'outbreak' behaviour that must surely be paranormal in nature.
 
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