"I am pretty sure that we can all agree on one point: if bigfoot does not exist, the film does not show one."
So the question "is bigfoot real" is entirely germane to the discussion.
Okay, so prove a negative. Show that Bigfoot doesn't exist and I'll happily reconsider.
You mean there's a chance Patterson faked the footprints, but the Bigfoot was real?
Of course there is. If you go out tonight and lay some fake cow tracks across the next village, does that turn the farmer's cows into cryptids when I show up to film them the next morning? One's got no bearing on the other.
Or that the behaviour is unnatural, but the Bigfoot is natural? it just ate something weird in the morning, and that explains the "clown shoes" gait and the non-reclusiveness that day? and that the people who wonder why Patterson finds a Bigfoot the year after he publishes a book with a sketch that's, in hindsight, more accurate than, say, medieval European pictures of African animals that actually existed, are biased acainst Bigfoot and not against Patterson?
Biased
against the creature in the film being faked. Your ideas of how it should walk instead or what a coincidence it was for Patterson to find it in the first place don't address this. You could use them as arguments if we knew for sure what a real Bigfoot walks like or at least what one looks like but until then all these arguments hold no water. Who says the 'clown shows' gait needs to be explained? What makes you so sure the sketch is more accurate? Are you comparing it to your personal image of what you think the real thing is like? How could you use that to explain away the creature in the PGF?
Again - this is not about the chances of Bigfoot being real, this is about the film being faked or not.
Like
@jamesrav , who has ignored the arguments in favor of it being a suit with the mantra "What I can see is a bias that this cannot exist and therefore it must be a suit", you are dismissing the arguments addressed at the creature in this film to declare "lots of people have already made up their minds that there is no such thing as a Bigfoot".
Did I say at any point that it's definitely not a suit? No. I'm not dismissing arguments, I'm merely pointing out that they don't apply to the question of is the film faked or not and so shouldn't be made in the first place, and that many points raised seem like foregone conclusions based on personal imagination.
I've also not seen any convincing case being made for this being a suit other than people pointing at movie examples etc and saying, see? Looks like one of these. To which I'll reply, well no it doesn't though.
Logical argument and evidence are valid regardless of the person pointing them out. Not they who ask questions are biased, it's those who won't hear the answers.
This is quite funny actually because I feel I've been repeating myself several times already with barely anyone listening. I'll just do it again then -
your arguments do not answer the question at hand and your evidence is vastly based on conjecture.
If you see a film of a giraffe walking a tightrope, we can assume the film is fake. If "experts" can examine it's gait, why cant we examine it's overall behavior?
The gait is one of the few hard data points we got because it's right there in the video so it affords us an opportunity for objective analysis. We can try to figure out if it resembles other known animals, if something about it would be exclusive to human walking and so on.
A giraffe on a tightrope is rather more absurd than the PGF, isn't it? If you see a film of a giraffe walking along the side of a creek, would you assume it's fake? I'd guess you won't.
It's not really up to us to prove it's a suit, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
Many here seem quite eager to do so, though.
You could also argue that the PGF
is extraordinary evidence. Clear footage of a cryptid in broad daylight.
But Patterson's Bigfoot came out of hiding, and that needs a motive. Wild animals enter human settlements in winter when food is scarce. But why is this Bigfoot now leaving extremely clear, extraordinary footprints in a place where no such footprints were seen before, or after?
There were reports of footprints in the area from the time before the film. That's the reason Patterson and Gimlin drove all the way down there in the first place - because they figured that would make it a good spot to try and find one.
Either this Bigfoot is good at hiding, then why is there?
It's not unheard of for animals to seek fresh water sources, is it? As opposed to animals that do nothing but hide all day.
Or it is bad at hiding, then why was it never seen again?
Who says noone ever saw a Bigfoot again?
Or is there some reason for the Bigfoot to be good at hiding, but bad on the exact day that Patterson wants to film one?
Patterson had been trying to film one for weeks at that point. He didn't just ride up, start shooting and there she was. Maybe what you suggest is exactly what happened. Maybe if she hid better we wouldn't have the PGF, and if she hid worse we'd not have one PGF, but 10, or 100, or 1000.
for it to never leave any footprints except on that day?
This is incorrect as explained above. But again we're now back to discussing the possibility of Bigfoot being real, not the validity of the PGF.