Would You Shoot Bigfoot?

[SavageSniper]

I agree Art. Hunting is a sport in the since that it is a physical and mentally challenging activity that is competitive. It is competive between hunter and prey of course, but in "most" people it is also competive with hunters too. I know that we all hunt or should hunt for the meat and the experiance of the hunt but lets face it, we judge our success be it number of kills or size of rack, ect against other hunters. That is what makes hunting such a wonderful sport. I guess that you can say that we can have our cake and eat it too.

[Scorch]

I can see it now-
Sasquatch- it's what's for dinner!

[Tomas]

If I was sure Han Solo would't come out of the clouds and shred me with his blasters...yes.

The bigger question is, would Sanow count it as a "one shot stop"?

[edmorales]

with my nikon i would, now if he comes any closer and shows any intent of doing harm, my 1911 is always cocked and locked and i would not hesistate
ed

[FirstFreedom]

Well now that begs the question, what handgun caliber for Sasquatch defense when you're attacked just trying to take some pictures. I say .50 GI!

[castnblast]

I'd shoot it...I hear they taste like chicken...

[Cyrgelman]

So would you serve red wine with a nice roasted bigfoot or white wine?

[lawdogso]

A member of the Canadian Mounted Police by the name of Mike Lake has officially notified the Canadian Parliament that he believes that Bigfoot should be added to the Nation's, Species at Risk Act.
Is it real?
Credit: Public
Copyright: Public
Enlarge + This is similar to the Endangered Species List in the United States.

According to Mr. Lake, the creature that is also known as the Sasquatch is real, and is endangered. The reason, he says that there have not been more sightings in North America of Bigfoot is because the creature is endangered, not necessarily shy like many believe.

Currently there are 516 plants and animals that are listed in the Species at Risk Act in Canada. There are many other candidates for this list that are being considered including the Whooping Crane, the Blue Whale, and Red Mulberry trees.

There have been similar motions to add Bigfoot to the Endangered Species list in the United States. Congress has refused to listen to these requests because Congress does not believe that there is solid proof to the existence of Bigfoot.

There is a lot of evidence that point to the possibility of the existence of Bigfoot. The fact that 90% of the western Provinces of Canada are uninhabited leads many to believe that there may be plants and animals living there that have yet to be discovered by modern man.

The story of Bigfoot dates back before the discovery of North America. Many Native American and Canadian tribes recorded stories about a creature that was half man and half beast that wondered around in the western States and Provinces.

The interest in Bigfoot mostly started back in 1811 when David Thompson discovered large, well-defined footprints in Jasper, Alberta, Canada. The Patterson-Gimlin Film of Bigfoot was shot on October 20, 1967. this film of the creature walking through a clearing in the woods in California has become the most popular bit of evidence for the existence of the creature.

All of the recorded sightings of Bigfoot have been greeted with speculation in the United States and Canada. All of the photos and film of Bigfoot have also been met with speculation as to whether or not the creature was real, or if a human in a suit was pictured.

It will be interesting to see if the Canadian Parliament accepts the bid to place Bigfoot of the list for protected animals and plants. If the Canadian Government takes this step, the United States Government might soon follow that lead of its northern neighbor.

[Cyrgelman]

The Patterson-Gimlin Film of Bigfoot was shot on October 20, 1967. this film of the creature walking through a clearing in the woods in California has become the most popular bit of evidence for the existence of the creature.

I was under the impression that this film was a hoax, admitted as much by one of the complicitors who died recently. (1999 IIRC.)

P.S. Okay, maybe it was 1996.

http://www.sacred-texts.com/ufo/foothoax.htm

[Double Naught Spy]

Actually, they found and interviewed the guy out in Calif. who got in the suit and played bigfoot, because of the funny way he walked (still walks) - him and his buddies admitted the whole story in great detail after Patterson died. Patterson paid them like $1,000 each to go out and help him make the film - they trekked a good ways into the wilderness on horseback. Just some good ol' boys.

I always liked how when the film was presented on various TV programs that some "expert" would go over the film and state how the gate and arm swing are uniquely simian and that it could not be imitated by a guy in an ape suit. To me, it just looked like a tall, lanky guy in an ape suit walking.

I also seem to recall something about the head turn where Bigfoot looks back at the camera and that the head turn and torso twist were non-human as well. Of course if you put a guy in an ape suit, his mobility is limited.

[ClassicSWC]

Bob Herinomous who claimed to be the guy in the suit has been discredited. Which story of his do you believe? That Patterson made the suit out of horse hair or the version where he says that Patterson bought the suit? He even names the company that Patterson allegedly bought the suit from except that the company never sold a suit like the one Bob described.

How about his claim that Patterson let he keep the suit for awhile and he drove around with it in full view on his back seat right after the film was taken? His story doesn't add up. He is also not the first person to have claimed to have been the man in the suit. Pretty easy to make up stuff now when Patterson has been dead since '72.

If Patterson could buy a suit like that, why didn't they use them in 2001 a Space Odyessy? "Bigfoot" looked more "real" than those apes.

John Chambers, one of the premier special fx guys in the '60's said he could not duplicate what is in the Patterson film. The Disney fx team also said that they could not duplicate it.

The Discovery Channel did a re-enactment at the very same spot in the late '90's, early 2000's, using the best suit they could come up with etc. Doesn't look half as real as the Patterson film.

This all proves my point. If anyone takes a pic of it, so what? It will prove nothing. You'll be called a kook or a hoaxster. The Patterson film is about as good of quality as you are going to get and people don't believe it. Short of Marty Stauffer coming across one with his super duper camera equipment that costs more than most peoples cars and weighs about as much. The only thing folks will believe is seeing the actual body.

[Kreyzhorse]

I don't think I could shoot. Regardless of what I was seeing, I'd still think it was a dumbass in a suit. With that said, can you imagine the hate mail you'd get from PETA if you killed one? On a positive note though, no one would ever have a better hunting story than yours, ever.

[Death from Afar]

Hes got a nice head. He'd mount up good.

[FirstFreedom]

I always liked how when the film was presented on various TV programs that some "expert" would go over the film and state how the gate and arm swing are uniquely simian and that it could not be imitated by a guy in an ape suit. To me, it just looked like a tall, lanky guy in an ape suit walking.

That was kinda my thought - I don't see what the "experts" thought they knew that I didn't.

Hes got a nice head. He'd mount up good

LMAO!

I don't think I could shoot. Regardless of what I was seeing, I'd still think it was a dumbass in a suit. With that said, can you imagine the hate mail you'd get from PETA if you killed one? On a positive note though, no one would ever have a better hunting story than yours, ever.

3 very good points.

ClassicSWC, in your defense, that wikipedia article I linked to earlier in the thread supports a lot of the contra claims to what I said, in support of your arguments, and some of it is even a bit compelling about the patterson film:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patterson-Gimlin_film

.....
Dmitri Donskoy
A formal academic study of the Patterson film was conducted by Dmitri Donskoy, Chief of the Dept. of Biomechanics at the USSR Central Institute of Physical Culture, and later associated with Moscow’s Darwin Museum (Daegling, 45). Donskoy believed that the creature was non-human based on its weight and its gait. He inferred it was weighty from the ponderous momentum he observed in the movements of its arms and legs, in the sagging of the knee as weight came onto it, and in the flatness of the foot. Its gait he considered non-artificial because it was confident and unwavering, "neatly expressive," and well-coordinated, and yet non-human because its arm motion and glide resembled a cross-country skier's. Krantz describes Donskoy’s conclusion as being that the film depicts “a very massive animal that is definitely not a human being” (Krantz, 92).

D.W. Grieve
Anatomist D.W. Grieve of the Royal Free Hospital School of Medicine studied a copy of the film in 1971, and wrote a detailed analysis. He notes that "The possibility of a very clever fake cannot be ruled out on the evidence of the film," but also writes that his analysis hinges largely on the question of filming speed (see above).

Grieve concluded that "the possibility of fakery is ruled out if the speed of the film was 16 or 18 frames per second. In these conditions a normal human being could not duplicate the observed pattern, which would suggest that the Sasquatch must possess a very different locomotor system to that of man." If filmed at the higher speed, Grieve concluded that the creature “walked with a gait pattern very similar in most respects to a man walking at high speed.”

Grieve noted that "I can see the muscle masses in the appropriate places ... If it is a fake, it is an extremely clever one" (Hunter and Dahinden, 120). Like Krantz, Greive thought the figure's shoulders were quite broad. Also like Krantz, Grieve thought Patterson's estimate of the figure's height was inaccurate. Grieve concluded the figure in the Patterson film revealed "an estimated standing height for the subject of not more than 6 ft. 5 in. (196 cm.)." He notes that a tall human is consistent with the figure's height, but also notes that for a tall human, "The shoulder breadth however would be difficult to achieve without giving an unnatural appearance to the arm swing and shoulder contours."[4]

More personally, Grieve notes that his “subjective impressions have oscillated between total acceptance of the Sasquatch based on the grounds that the film would be difficult to fake, to one of irrational rejection based on an emotional response to the possibility that the Sasquatch actually exists. This seems worth stating because others have reacted similarly to the film” (cited in Byrne, 157).


Grover Krantz
Krantz offered an in-depth examination of the Patterson film (Krantz, 87-124). He concluded that the film depicts a genuine, unknown creature, citing the following factors, among others:

Primarily, Krantz's argument is based on a detailed analysis of the figure's stride, center of gravity, and biomechanics. Krantz argues that the creature's leg and foot motions are quite different from a human's and could not have been duplicated by a person wearing a gorilla suit
Krantz pointed out the tremendous width of the creature's shoulders, which (after deducting 1" for hair) he estimated at 28.2 inches, or 35.1% of its full standing height of 78". (Or a higher percentage of its 72" "walking height," which was a bit stooped, crouched, and sunk-into-the-sand (Krantz, 106-08).) The creature's shoulders are almost 50% wider than the human mean. (For instance, André the Giant had a typical human ratio of 24%. Wide-shouldered Bob Heironimus (see below) has 27.4%. Only very rare humans have a shoulder breadth of 30%.) Krantz argued that a suited person could not mimic this breadth and still have the naturalistic hand and arm motions present on the film.
Krantz wrote, “the knee is regularly bent more than 90°, while the human leg bends less than 70°.” No human has yet replicated this level lower leg lift while maintaining the smoothness, posture, and stride length (41") of the creature.
Krantz and others have noted naturalistic-looking musculature visible as the creature moved, arguing this would be highly difficult or impossible to fake. Hunter and Dahinden also note that "the bottom of the figure's head seems to become part of the heavy back and shoulder muscles ... the muscles of the buttocks were distinct" (Hunter and Dahinden, 114).
Krantz also interviewed Patterson extensively, and as noted below, thought Patterson lacked the technical skill and knowledge needed to create such a realistic-looking costume.
Krantz reports that in 1969 John Green (who at one point owned a first-generation copy of the original Patterson film) interviewed Disney executive Ken Peterson, who after viewing the Patterson film, asserted "that their technicians would not be able to duplicate the film" (Krantz, 93). Krantz argues that if Disney personnel (among the best special effects experts of their era) were unable to duplicate the film, there's little likelihood that Patterson could have done so.
More recently, Krantz showed the film to Gordon Valient, a researcher for Nike shoes, who he says "made some rather useful observations about some rather unhuman movements he could see" (ibid).

Jeff Meldrum
Dr. Jeff Meldrum of Idaho State University cites efforts by John Green as important in his own studies of the Patterson film. "It has been obvious to even the casual viewer that the film subject possesses arms that are disproportionately long for its stature." Meldrum writes that "Anthropologists typically express limb proportions as an intermembral index (IM)" and notes that humans have an average IM index of 72, gorillas an average IM index of 117 and chimpanzees an average IM index of 106.

In determining an IM index for the figure in the Patterson film, Meldrum concludes the figure has "an IM index somewhere between 80 and 90, intermediate between humans and African apes. In spite of the imprecision of this preliminary estimate, it is well beyond the mean for humans and effectively rules out a man-in-a-suit explanation for the Patterson-Gimlin film without invoking an elaborate, if not inconceivable, prosthetic contrivance to account for the appropriate positions and actions of wrist and elbow and finger flexion visible on the film. This point deserves further examination and may well rule out the probability of hoaxing."[6]

North American Science Institute
The North American Science Institute was founded in Hood River, Oregon in the late 1990s to study the Sasquatch phenomenon. As of 2006 the group is apparently defunct, but in 1998 the organization undertook a $75,000 study, employing computer analysis, of the Patterson-Gimlin film. Here are some of the authenticating details it noted:

Arm length (measured to the fingertips) as a percent of height: The percent for the human mean is 44%; the creature's percent is 49%, which is 5.5 standard deviations from the human mean and is present in only .00019% of humans. Finger and hand flexion is observed in the film, which implies that [any arm-extending] prosthesis must support flexion.
Leg length (measured to the sole) as a percent of height: The percent for the human mean is 53%; the creature's percent is 46%, which is present in only .1% of humans.
Foot morphology: Figure 13 shows the foot undergoing flexion, which demonstrates that the foot is not a solid, inflexible prosthesis. Separate toes are visible. "Key features of the foot ... resemble the plaster cast taken by Titmus."
Face morphology: The jaw of the subject is below the shoulder line, as in a gorilla.
Body morphology: Unlike inexpensive costumes, the subject has non-uniform hair texture, non-uniform coloration and non-uniform hair length.
Kinematics: "The knee theta of the film subject shows a more gradual transfer of weight rather than a [human-type] separate phase" combined with the absence of the bobbing head typical of human locomotion.
Moving muscle groups: Groups of muscle in motion can be seen, in the arms, back and legs. "Also seen is a structure similar to a knee cap, the shape of which changes like a human knee."
It concluded, "If only a single dimension of similarity was shown in the P-G film it could be easily dismissed as a forgery [but it] is remarkable in the simultaneous presence of all of the dimensions listed above."

[FirstFreedom]

more...

Indeed, if they had perpetrated a hoax, they were most confident of it, in seeking various experts to examine the film. Patterson screened the film for unnamed “technicians in the special effects department at Universal Studios in Hollywood ... Their conclusion was: ‘We could try (faking it), but we would have to create a completely new system of artificial muscles and find an actor who could be trained to walk like that. It might be done, but we would have to say that it would be almost impossible’” (Hunter and Dahinden, 119).

John Chambers
Rumors circulated that the creature seen in the Patterson-Gimlin film was a suit designed by movie special effects expert John Chambers, who designed the ape costumes seen in many of the original Planet of the Apes films, and was reportedly an acquaintance of Ray Wallace and Bob Gimlin.

Film director John Landis (who had earlier worked with Chambers on Beneath the Planet of the Apes) certainly helped spread such rumors, if he didn’t invent them outright. Coleman and Clark cite a 1997 Sunday Telegraph story where Landis says, “That famous piece of film of Bigfoot walking in the woods that was touted as the real thing was just a suit made by John Chambers” (Coleman and Clark, 56). The allegation has been repeated by pioneering makeup artist Rick Baker.

Shortly after Landis's story was published, stimulated by inquiries from cryptozoologist Loren Coleman, Bigfoot researcher Roberta Short interviewed Chambers, who was living in a Los Angeles nursing home. Chambers asserted he did not know Patterson or Gimlin, was not involved in making the film, and had no knowledge of the Patterson-Gimlin film before its public exposure. Chambers added “that he was ‘good’ but he ‘was not that good’ to have fashioned anything nearly so convincing as the Bluff Creek Bigfoot” (Coleman and Clark, 56). Chambers also told Short he had once helped create a Bigfoot sculpture, and speculated that this fact may have started or fueled the rumors that he was involved in the Patterson film.

It is also worth noting that Chambers’ innovative Planet of the Apes make-up relied primarily on expressive masks, not on body suits, and whatever seams or "zippers" would have appeared on the Planet of the Apes suits were covered up by clothing. Clothing was also used to cover up certain folds and seams on the Ewok costumes in Return of the Jedi (1983). Even when the costumes became more elaborate in the 1970s, King Kong in the 1976 remake still had a clearly-defined separation between the body of the suit and the head mask. Folds in the material have appeared in every film in which there was human costumed as an ape up until Gorillas in the Mist (1988), and they can be identified as such either in close-up or at a distance. In the Patterson/Gimlin film of Bigfoot, there are no identifiable folds seen, which means either or both men had their hands on a costume that was far superior to anything made in Hollywood in the mid-1960's.