Patterson-Gimlin Bigfoot film is a hoax?

[jarlrmai]

I think this can be compared to the way really old UFO photos are treated by believers. The Trent photos are a great example. Believers often treat old photos as "better evidence", claiming that the technology needed to fake them didn't exist back when they were taken. They're right that Photoshop didn't exist and that analog photography had certain limitations when it came to methods of faking photos. But they chose to forget that, at the end of the day, none of this really matters. Faking the Trent photos wouldn't have required Photoshop or any advanced digital technology. All that was needed was a model and some fishing line. And the same goes for the PG film. A gorilla suit and some experimentation with posture and gait are really all that would have been needed, since both the proportions and the way the figure walks are consistent with a human in a costume. But it's the same old argument: "It's an old photo/video, therefore it must be real."

These days AI has replaced photoshop in this type of flawed argument.

 

[Mendel]

Believers often treat old photos as "better evidence", claiming that the technology needed to fake them didn't exist back when they were taken.

So old science fiction and horror movies are actually documentaries?

 

[jarlrmai]

So old science fiction and horror movies are actually documentaries?

https://www.metabunk.org/threads/ca...rom-the-day-the-earth-stood-still-1951.15061/

 

[yoshy]

"mid-tarsal break"

Great post overall, and this is the term I should have used rather than "arch". I was going off memory and totally forgot this term. That's the one I have heard claimed as evidence that the casts, and hence Patty in the PG film, are real.

 

[Andreas]

So old science fiction and horror movies are actually documentaries?

Yup, using the same logic, they must all be documentaries. We all know King Kong DID climb the Empire State Building. He must have, since I've seen it on film…

 

[JMartJr]

And if there isn't a large population wouldn't inbreeding become a massive problem?

Also, showing up in all the places they get reported would require a fairly large population"

Source: Saved from the Internet some time ago, if it becomes important I can go track it down.

But the point it, although I often think "Bigfoot, elusive man-ape of the Pacific Northwest," reports come in from pretty much everywhere in the US that there are people. That's a pretty darn big range there, even if ol' BF is pretty uncommon in any area across his range, you'd still need a lot of them just to cover the number of places they're supposedly seen.

And the more of them there are, the more chances for one to get shot by a hunter, or hit by a car, or caught in a trap, or otherwise be definitively shown to exist.

Of course, it could be argued that some of those areas don't have any Bigfeet, just people making erroneous and/or hoax reports. But the more that is true, the more firmly it establishes that there need not be ANY of them in the real world for them to be reported!

 

[John J.]

At the national (US) level, there seems to be a correlation between where Bigfoot is seen and where UFOs are reported:

Surely this is significant evidence of some strange Bigfoot-UFO connection!
Waydaminnit:

(2nd, 3rd maps from https://nuforc.org/newmap/ and https://www.worldmap1.com/united-states-population-density-map#google_vignette)
Roughly similar maps can be found showing the distribution of other things across the US, including schools, bars, registered drone operators.

To a degree we might expect there to be more Bigfoot reports in areas with higher populations because there are more potential witnesses,
but a strong correlation only makes sense if Bigfoot is relatively evenly distributed across the continental US or is drawn towards human habitation (including major metropolitan areas) in most parts of the nation.

I would guess (haven't checked) that maps of the distribution of sightings of "established" (irrefutably existing) wild animals in the US, say bison (buffalo), wolves, alligators, would not show such a clear correlation with human population density.

 

[Stryder]

I posit that Bigfoot is perfectly uniformly distributed across the U.S. and the world, and the moon....

 

[Ravi]

Are there also a similar maps, from regions outside of the US? I guess (certainly) not.

 

[JMartJr]

Are there also a similar maps, from regions outside of the US? I guess (certainly) not.

I have not found any. There might be one based on Canadian sightings as reported to a Canadian clearing house?

Worth noting the the usual UFO sightings map one finds on the Internet shows a strong bias towards places where there are a lot if people per unit of area and English is spoken. This hints that such maps including multiple countries and based on reports of sightings may reveal more about the linguistic range of the map compiler than about how widespread reports are. Example: a UFO map compiled by an English speaker who did not know the terms used for UFO in Spanish and other languages (eg: OVNI) will miss a lot of reports from Central or South America, among other places...

 

[Mendel]

There aren't enough yeti sightings to do statistics with.

https://maphub.net/TheHorrorCollection/yeti-abominable-snowman-sightings-map-updated-2026