Some writings from Roger Knights on the P/G Movie

Here are the “points of annoyance” with SG’s posts in the preceding days that provoked me into tuning him out:

• Apparent acceptance of the Bob Heironimus claims, which is silly since he’s been following developments on that front here. (SG is probably following the herd’s opinion on JREF—see my Note at end.)

• He said, “Gimlin didn’t do interviews with skeptics,” nastily and misleadingly insinuating that Gimlin is in the habit of doing interviews with all other questioners and makes a point of filtering his interviewers.

• He concluded one of his rebuttals to me with the “dig,” “but you knew that,” which implied I had knowingly presented a false argument. It was an insult, implicitly, and it was the culmination of a long train of similar abuses. As bad as his insulting content is his mock-portentous tone—he seems to imagine he’s a clever Socratic gadfly when he slings such witless gibes. (Maybe one in four of them “comes off”—but that’s too low a batting average to justify his tactic.)

• His crazy-making response below, indicative of either a lack of attention, or a desire to be a noodge, or both:

QUOTE(Skeptical Greg @ Aug 8 2007, 07:39 PM)

Did you catch the Discovery Channel bit where Dr. Meldrum agreed the actor did a pretty good job of imitating the walk?

QUOTE(RogerKni @ Aug 8 2007, 08:59 PM)

I'd like to see that portion of the Discovery Channel episode.... I'm particularly interested to see if the actor's weight-bearing shank is vertical or forward-leaning .... I don't have much faith in Meldrum's eye for Patty's gait, because he stated in his book (p. 159) (following Krantz) that her legs were not shorter than human length.

QUOTE(Skeptical Greg @ Aug 9 2007, 08:49 AM)

Then what would be the point in you reviewing the Discovery Channel segment ?

It irritates me to be forced to explicate the obvious to someone who, I suspect, is often mostly interested in showing off to his fellows on JREF. (“Look at me taunting the gullible goobers! Aren’t I a devil of a fellow?”) That suspicion is bolstered by some of the very meretricious posts he’s made, the worst being this:

QUOTE(RogerKni @ Jun 7 2006, 04:31 AM)

So Meteor Crater (in Arizona) is just a hole in the ground, and is inappropriately named, because there's no object to match it to? [SG had contended this earlier regarding a Bigfoot footprint: there’s no foot to match it to, so it’s meaningless.--RK] Of course, your response would be that we know that meteors exist, so it's no unwarranted leap to infer from its "footprint" that a meteorite was the cause of it.

But wind the clock back 210 years, to 1796. Then, you and your ilk were as sure there were no meteors as you are sure today there are no Bigfoots. If you'd been shown a picture of meteor crater, would you have said that it proves nothing, and that the only evidence science should accept is seeing one being made?
……………
Under those standards, meteors would still be unconfirmed.

To which I received the following jerk-of-the-year response:

QUOTE(SG)

Real lame Roger...
We have proof that meteorites exist and what their prints look like..
You are capable of better, but I find your desperation comforting..

Here’s a more recent irritant—the 4th time he employed this cheap shot, despite repeated warnings:

QUOTE(Skeptical Greg @ Jul 1 2007, 12:17 PM)

But it's O.K. for Patterson to not be sure whether or not a horse fell on him ?

QUOTE(RogerKni @ Jan 9 2007, 02:13 PM)

As I've pointed out to you twice before when you've made this identical remark, which I will henceforth consider to be a deliberate "cheap shot," Patterson always remembered that the horse fell on him.

He’s not a good-faith disputant, IOW. He isn’t paying attention; he’s just interested in scoring points or, failing that, evading being put in the wrong. Why even listen to someone like this? Especially one whose haughty tone is so maddeningly inappropriate, in light of the near-scandalous “stretchers” he’s indulged in. (Such as the red line he employed to supposedly measure Patty’s calf as not expanding in the touch-down phase. Remember that one, boys and girls?) Bipto expressed my attitude:

QUOTE(Bipto @ regarding Dfoot and a couple of others)

I have no fear of debating the PG film. Far from it. However, I do not feel this is a debate. This is opportunistic argumentativeness from the worst kind of skeptics.

OTOH, SG’s sometimes made good points, and he’s sometimes forced our side to explicate its position, and even thereby to strengthen it. (For instance, in the matter of Patty’s calf-bulge, no one would have noticed, without his provocation, that it actually bulged when she splayed out her toes a moment PRIOR to touch-down. That makes better anatomical sense than its happening UPON touchdown.) But I just “can’t stand the guff” anymore.

++++++++++

However, I made a tactical error by “snapping” after one of his less objectionable posts. So—just to show I wasn’t afraid of dealing with it—I’ll make one last response to him:

SG’s contention about that the frame-data on the gait is too scanty to form conclusions from is “trumped up.” E.g., first, there are many additional frames from the end of the film where Patty can be seen performing her level leg lift. And there are MKD’s recently stabilized frames (though only a few) from the beginning of the film that show a few steps.

Second, his derogation of the quality of the main-segment frames is exaggerated: what he says would be justified only if Patty had been walking behind a screen of brush or leaves, and we had to strain to catch fragmentary glimpses of her through dappled shadows and reflections.

Third, he misleadingly implied that my conclusion about Patty’s lower leg being level and her thigh being vertical was based on only the pair of single frames I mentioned. But I mentioned that pair because I wanted to cite frames that are pictured in the Murphy book, so skeptics who don’t have any other convenient access to the film frames can consult them to see what I’m talking about. (I don’t have such access either, not trusting myself to any but the most basic graphics and video work on my PC.) But there are of course other, similar poses by Patty that support my observation, since her gait is regular and most of her body is visible.

(Two slight qualifications are that her lower leg is not captured at the top of its upward swing in every step, because the camera was running at the low FPS of 16 frames/second; and that it’s not certain that her toe is “grounded” during a couple of the apparent “toe-off” frames, because there’s a log that blocks the view of the tip of the foot. (But, if experts in gait-motion and photogrammetry interpolated her movements elsewhere, the likelihood that the toe is grounded could be considerably strengthened (or weakened).))

All the above is something he is, or should be, aware of. That’s a thought I’ve had after reading many of his posts.

++++++++++

Note: I’ve lamented in the past that few scoftics had endorsed Bob Heironimus’s baloney, which meant we wouldn’t be able to hang them for it later. I’m delighted to see that this is changing over on JREF, thanks in large part to Poster Parcher. He’s made several eminently grist-worthy statements. But I’m not putting them in the hopper and turning the crank until after my presentation at Arcata.

However, I’ll respond to one minor comment of his. He said that I should stop “ranting about [Heironimus’s saying Patterson skinned] a red horse.” But in fact I’ve never done so. (Indeed, I’ve always winced when I’ve seen that argument made, because, as Long pointed out in his Q-and-A list on the Rense site, this was not Heironimus’s direct observation, but hearsay he repeated from his brother Mike. I’ve even thought of including it in a list of Weak Arguments I Wish Our Side Wouldn’t Make.)

I’ve only pointed out that it’s suspicious that Heironimus gave credence to the possibility of the suit’s being leather, after he’d worn a fabric suit by Morris. Leather has a supple hand-feel that is quite different from mesh fabric. This is hardly a strong enough suspicion to hang him on; it’s merely something to consider in evaluating his tale. But, if there are a dozen other such points-of-suspicion, they add up—so that’s why I’ve mentioned it. Adding-up is the way cases are won:

QUOTE(Ragnar Benson @ “Ragnar’s Guide to Interviews, Investigations, and Interrogations,” p. 89)

Good attorneys … claim that effective cross-examinations are usually a collection of little probables rather than one great telling point that wins the whole thing.

PS to my post 138:
1A. Similarly, Merle Warehime’s response implied, between the lines, that there’d been no change in BH‘s gait over the years. When asked, “Are you convinced that Bob Heironimus was the guy who wore the Bigfoot suit?”, Warehime replied, "Oh, yes. Yeah. That's the way Bob walks. All you have to do is watch him walk across the floor, and you know." (p. 332)

TE(Gigantofootecus @ Jul 27 2007, 12:45 PM) [snapback]399198[/snapback]

This one's pretty straightforward Roger.
...........................
Bob H just doesn't fit. I defy anyone to fit Bob H in the suit at any orientation.
...........................

GF:
1. After either rotation, how much longer is Patty’s step than BH‘s, in percentage terms?

2. I’m going to speak in Arcata and would like to use your images as transparencies during my presentation. Could you add the information I’ve just requested to the text overlay you’ve placed on the images?

3. To make it easier for people to read, could you enlarge the text and split the image into two comp-images, the first with the leftmost pair, the second with the rightmost pair?

4. Could you also make up a comp that uses the image of BH walking away at an angle from Long’s book, p. 361, just to make sure his step isn’t longer there? (This image has been posted here several times, for instance in the threads showing Nightwing’s comp pictures regarding the knee height.)

This is a lot to ask, but this set of images, in conjunction with Nightwing’s, says it all, so it’s worth the effort. (If you come to Arcata, I’ll let you have that K-100 for as long as you might like to have it—plus a small mannequin and turntable to take shots of with it, plus a roll of film. (It can be set to take single-frame shots, like a still camera.) That’ll save postage.)

PS to my post #90; an 8th reason why a non-sociopath would make the sort of claim that BH has:

8. A possible “prankster mentality” that would excuse a false claim as the deserved leg-pulling of an over-serious group of Bigfoot Believers, or as an attempt to liven things up in his sleepy little burg. BH has demonstrated a willingness to prank in the past, with his roadside apesuit hoaxing, as describe by Merle Warehime, and by his riding a horse into a tavern on a bet (p. 356). He stated elsewhere, “Hell, I’d do anything, you know.” (p. 353)

QUOTE(Skeptical Greg @ Aug 8 2007, 07:39 PM) [snapback]401143[/snapback]

Looks a lot like a clown wearing over-sized shoes.
The skeleton animation in PGF did a good job of illustrating this..
Did you catch the Discovery Channel bit where Dr. Meldrum agreed the actor did a pretty good job of imitating the walk ?

I'd like to see a video of clowns walking, for comparison. Maybe someone could post a link to a YouTube segment? And I'd like to see the Cow Camp recreation, to see if BH did the bicycle-pedaling motion then, to get clearance. Patty seems to lift her foot a lot higher than would be necessary to get clearance on a flat sand/gravel bar.

I'd like to see that portion of the Discovery Channel episode--indeed, I posted a request here at the time for someone to post pix from it. I'm particularly interested to see if the actor's weight-bearing shank is vertical or forward-leaning at the moment when his trailing shank has rotated 60 degrees or so from the vertical. In Daegling's book, the actor doing a compliant gait has a forward-leaning shank, while Patty at that point has a vertical one--see frame 310, p. 52 in Meet the Sasquatch.

I don't have much faith in Meldrum's eye for Patty's gait, because he stated in his book (p. 159) (following Krantz) that her legs were not shorter than human length.

Mangler (post 132): In the both images of Patty you posted vs. BH, Patty's sole is nearly vertical at toe-off while BH's is 30 degrees short of vertical.

In the leftmost image of Patty (the more side-on, or comparable, one), I see the following differences:

1. Patty's lower leg has rotated 75 degrees out of vertical at toe-off; BH's has rotated only 60 degrees from the vertical.

2. Patty's right thigh is at least 10 degrees less vertical than BH's, and if she were viewed side-on, that difference would be greater.

3. Patty's step is much longer than BH's (GF has the numbers), and would be longer still if she were viewed side-on.

Once we compare their walks in an analytic, non-impressionistic manner, their distinct differences become clear. It's almost a textbook case of how a noticeable similarity--the gliding smoothness of their compliant gaits--deceives us and leads some people--especially those who wish to see a similarity--into making a false judgment that they are a good match.

When their moving gaits are looked at analytically, another important difference can be seen: the bicycle-pedaling motion of Patty's knee. I.e., the lower leg is held more nearly horizontal while it is swung forward than a human's is, even a human doing a compliant-gait walk.

QUOTE(Yetifan @ Aug 8 2007, 10:41 AM) [snapback]401040[/snapback]

Keep in mind that the comparison you show above involves BH 29 years after the PGF was shot. It could be the case that with the onset of aging, leg lift could be diminished.

But:

1. BH‘s nephew John Miller stated in 2003 that

QUOTE

“if you ever watch that footage and watch him [BH] walk, … you’ll see—they walk exactly the same. I always got a kick out of that.” (p. 365)

His “always” implied that there had been no change in BH‘s gait over the years. (Miller had been aware of BH‘s ape-suit possession since 1967.)

2. BH didn’t characterize his walk as anything that required athleticism in the first place. When asked by Long, “Did you feel comfortable and natural walking in the suit?”, he replied, "Oh yeah, it was easy.” (p. 346).

3. It stands to reason that strolling for 100 yards using the everyday gait of a man of 26 isn’t something that required significant athleticism. It was just “a walk in the park.” Therefore, it’s not something that should deteriorate, unlike, say, the ability to run 100 yards. No one’s asking him to do that—but some of his defenders verge on implying that his critics are doing so.

4. BH never gave any physical indication, when doing his recent Patty-walks, that he was pushing his physical limits. When Long asked him to do his Patty-walk (pp. 360-62), he described BH‘s walk as “effortless,” adding, “he never missed a beat” as he walked back and forth over a 100-foot course, “still in Bigfoot character,” while Long took photos “for more than ten minutes.”

5. Nor did BH give an oral indication to the effect that his gait wasn’t what it once had been.

6. BH never stated that he was originally instructed to lift his lower leg level. But a level lower leg lift is a very unnatural thing to do, even when employing a compliant gait. It requires a deliberate effort. It would therefore have been done only as a result of instruction by Patterson—which BH never mentioned. And yet BH mentioned the other gait-related instructions Patterson gave him, such as, “He’d yell out to me”:

• ‘Swing your arms back like this!’, or
• ‘Crouch down a little bit more like a gorilla walking.’ (p. 346)
• ‘Look at us a couple of times.’ (p. 350)

Those three adaptations were the easy ones for him to mimic and the obvious ones to mention. Anyone can see that the arms swing in a somewhat exaggerated way (for a human), that she walks with a forward lean, and it’s a commonplace in writings on Patty to see her bent-kneed gait described. So why didn’t he mention the one that was the most difficult, the least obvious, and the most noteworthy—to raise his lower leg to the level at the end of each step?

QUOTE(RayG @ Aug 8 2007, 04:05 AM) [snapback]400955[/snapback]

For the life of me I can't figure out why people hang on every word of BH or BG. Anyone can say anything, it doesn't make it true.

If we can falsify enough, what remains is true. However odd. Provisionally and for the moment. (I.e., it becomes "the current fantasy," as Kesey put it.)

We can certainly cast doubt on a person's claims by seeing if:
he embroiders his story, changes his story, assert implausible happenings in order to make his story fit the facts, exhibits ignorance of basic matters, behaves evasively, employs equivocation, reserves "wiggle room" ahead of time for future revisions, subtly contradicts himself, has a motive to lie, makes factual flubs that a phony claimant would tend to make (like saying he turned right at Yreka), etc., etc. It's a good intellectual exercise to sharpen our faculties enough to take note of those things, like solving a real-life detective story, apart from anything else.

And I'd like to do Gimlin a good turn, even if it's tangential to the larger Quest (or Snipe Hunt, if you prefer). As RB has said, the real things, and the strangest things, that you'll learn in this field are about the people in it. Maybe that's where our focus should be--at least some of the time.

QUOTE(Skeptical Greg @ Aug 7 2007, 02:33 PM) [snapback]400817[/snapback]

I don't see how another anecdote, verifiable or not, is a rebuttal of someone else's anecdote..

Well, first of all, as I mentioned, the two testimonies are not “on all fours” with each other: when a supposed supporting witness for the claimant, who presumably has no motive to harm his friend, “drops a brick,” that counts more than the original claimant’s story—especially if there are lots of other suspicious points in that story.

Second, Trammel is not the only witness who describes BH as having a suit outside the allowable 30-hour time window, when BH has denied having a suit. The first three below describe events after 1967. (I’ve posted their accounts elsewhere on BFF, mostly on the “Book Review: TMOB” thread.)

• Garry Record, who examined it in detail, and described features that are completely unlike the suits BH said were used in the film.
• Bernard Hammermeister, who told me that he’d heard talk about the suit at least a year before he was shown it. (He’s recanted his testimony after he talked to BH, but that just gets BH into a different pickle, and a worse one, as I’ve argued elsewhere here.)
• Jerry Kilpatrick, who works at Yakima airport, where Mike Heironimus is also employed, and said Mike had told him he (Mike) had seen the suit.
• Les Lenington, who told me that BH had shown off the suit from his Buick prior to the PG filming.
• Merle Warehime, who implied to Long that he’d seen the suit in BH‘s company before the filming, but who, when I pressed him for details and called him back with more questions, changed his story (I suspect to avoid more directly implicating BH) and denied that he’d ever seen any suit.

BTW, two of these witnesses not only impugn BH's tale, but indirectly also the credibility of two of his supporting witnesses, both relatives. I.e., they were aware of BH's long-term suit possession, but have either denied that they saw it except right after BH's return (Opal) or that they ever saw it at all (Mike).

I’m just a dilettante; I have no power to subpoena witnesses. But I’ve turned up enough here, with a very modest effort, to suggest that there must be lots more witnesses around Yakima with tales like these to tell. In other words, an enterprising paper or broadcaster in the Yakima area could score quite a scoop if it were to employ its resources to do a little digging. All it would need to do would be to publish or broadcast repeated appeals for persons with knowledge about ape-suit hoaxing to "drop a dime” on the perp.

(These could be witnesses with something damaging to say about Patterson, not just about BH. Let the chips fall where they may.)

QUOTE(bf2004 @ Aug 7 2007, 11:19 PM)

(Heironimus volunteered to send me his polygraph results, once Rob McConnell gives him my physical address). If I can get to a scanner, I will scan those results and send it here.

That's not going to work. The record of a lie-detector exam is about thirty feet long, for a typical session, full of handwritten notes. (In modern times, it's accompanied by a videotape of the session. I forgot to ask original-examiner McCormick if he employed this--I suspect not.) There's no way to easily copy it on a scanner or copier. It would be completely incomprehensible to a layman like you.

I suspect what BH plans to send you is a one- or two-page list of the questions asked and the examiner's opinion, not the tracings of the machine. The latter is what a different examiner needs to see if there's evidence in it of an attempt to beat the machine, or of questionable interpretation of a result by the previous examiner.

An inexpensive book on the subject of beating the lie detector, Deception Detection: Winning the Polygraph Game, by Charles Clifton, was published in 1991 by Paladin Press, which, I believe, advertised in Soldier of Fortune magazine. So the methods would have been available to BH, if he took the exam after that date. (Say, when DID he take the test? It's a little odd that the date isn't mentioned in Long's book.)

But I don't think it's likely that BH employed any such methods, although it's possible. It's more likely that, because:

• The examination was private (BH could suppress unfavorable results),
• The questions were probably known in advance, although not the exact wording perhaps,
• The questioner might have been more “friendly” than not. (Based on what Dave Murphy’s told me, I suspect Bob Heironimus was friendly with the chief of police, who might have asked his subordinate, Sgt. Jim McCormick, to do the exam using words like these: “Hey Jim, would you run my good buddy Bob here through your machine?” This might have had an impact on the way borderline results were interpreted.)
• The questioner was not knowledgeable enough about events around the PGF to ask any probing questions, and
• There had been no preliminary investigation that would have provided potentially embarrassing material to confront BH with (unlike a typical criminal-case lie-detector exam),

BH was able to sail through the test by simply keeping calm (by reminding himself of the above) and "staying on-message." (And of course we don't know if he had ever had practice sessions with another examiner somewhere.)

QUOTE(bf2004 @ Aug 7 2007, 09:03 PM) [snapback]400916[/snapback]

Also, I asked him and Rob if they were aware that, according to John Freitas (MasterBlaster right here on BFF) when I interviewed him the other night, he told me that Gimlin had taken a polygraph test in the late-60's-early-70's and passed it. Neither Rob or Bob H. were aware of that (Gimlin had never told Heironimus that).

Are you sure Freitas hasn't made a mistake? Patterson was the one who, it has recently become known, took a lie detector test then. But Gimlin is, I've heard, notable for declining to do so. For instance, in her 1978 book, Sasquatch Apparitions, pp. 84-85, Barbara Wasson urged, in guarded words, that Gimlin take such a test. She was a close acquaintance of his and drove back with him from Vancouver to Yakima after the 1978 conference, talking Bigfoot all the while, and sleeping overnight on his couch. She'd have known if he took such a test.

QUOTE(Skeptical Greg @ Aug 7 2007, 02:33 PM) [snapback]400817[/snapback]

An example of a rebuttal, would be like, showing he wasn't somewhere he said he was..

How would I do that? I've tried, by contacting Boise-Cascade's HRS department and asking them to release BH's work-attendance records. But they will only release such records to the individual himself, not to a third party (unless it's a prospective employer). So I've created a draft letter for BH to sign and send to them, and published it in The Track Record, and posted it here, and forwarded it to Xzone, which has in turn forwarded it to Korff, who has in turn forwarded it to BH. Apparently he hasn't acted on it. (It's unlikely such attendance records have been retained by B-C, given most companies' short-length record-retention policies, but it's worth asking.)

What else is there that could prove BH was somewhere else? Would I need a set of date-stamped surveillance-camera photos showing him in a 7-11 on every other day in Oct. 1967? (Such cameras weren't widely used then, anyway.) What I'm saying is that it's impossible to track a person's whereabouts, and it's unreasonable to demand that a rebuttal to someone's claim provide such tracking or be considered too lightweight to be given any credence. IOW, if you rule out contradictory witness testimony, you've made his position unfalsifiable.

There is some "hard" evidence against BH, for instance in the way his body proportions don't match Patty's, especially his knee height; and the way, as GF recently demonstrated, his step length is much shorter than Patty's relative to his height. Those things are verifiable. The film of BH's Cow Camp Patty-walk, which might allow us to measure those things better, has been withheld.

QUOTE(Skeptical Greg @ Aug 7 2007, 02:33 PM) [snapback]400817[/snapback]

I noticed I failed to address the substance of your reply to my question about " ...a rebuttal of BH's story with verifiable evidence... " I don't see how another anecdote, verifiable or not, is a rebuttal of someone else's anecdote..

When a party (like Don Trammel) who is a long-time friend of the claimant (BH), and who believes his story, attempts to support the claimant with his testimony, but instead accidentally reveals something damaging to the claimant, it's a powerful rebuttal of the original claim--that's the way it works in a court of law, and in the court of public opinion.

And that's where we are, not in a lab "doing science." Your using "anecdote" as a sneer-word to discredit witness testimony is a rhetorical trick to jerk some scientistic knees, possibly including your own. It's completely out of place.

If you applied your provable-evidence standard consistently, you might as well toss out BH's whole tale, because it is nothing but an anecdote. He has no hard evidence: no postal receipt, no photo, no work-attendance records, and no signature in the logbook of the motel he claims he slept in (p. 350). And that despite the fact that he might easily have retrieved it (or paid a local notary to verify it and/or make a copy of it) for several (four?) years after the filming, if he had wanted evidence with which to prove that he was really there then.

There's not even any hard record of his lie detector tests, because he won't release it, although he said he would when I asked him. (His lawyer subsequently didn't return the calls of a local lie detector expert--a person recommended by BH's original examiner--requesting those records, so I think it's safe to say he's giving me the runaround.)

QUOTE(Skeptical Greg @ Aug 7 2007, 02:33 PM) [snapback]400817[/snapback]

I don't see how another anecdote, verifiable or not, is a rebuttal of someone else's anecdote..

An example of a rebuttal, would be like, showing he wasn't somewhere he said he was..
But you know that ...

No, I thought what you meant by a verifiable anecdote was one that had been "corroborated" by another person (besides myself) who heard the same anecdote. That's what the legal system considers reasonable verification, when it comes to judging which side is telling the likelier tale.

People in this thread (above) have speculated on BH‘s motive and mentality. William Parcher on the JREF PGF thread (which, BTW, I’ve visited for a total of three hours since my last post there about eight months ago) opined that only if BH were a sociopath would he have come up with a tale that would so badly injure his buddy Bob Gimlin, and open himself to such a risk of being exposed.

Here’s my take on how a non-sociopath could be doing what BH is doing, and gotten sucked in to the alternate reality he now inhabits. (I’ve posted a slightly different version three years ago, in my long BFF post, Fate is the Hunter: Heironimus at Bay, at: http://www.bigfootforums.com/index.php?showtopic=6561) (For some reason it's stretched far to the right on my screen. I'm using Firefox on the Mac as my browser. I hope most people can view it properly.)

++++++++++++
In the 11 months prior to Patterson’s film, BH had been hoaxing roadside sightings (as described by Merle Warehime), had been in Patterson’s Bigfoot documentary, and had shown off the suit from his trunk to Les Lenington at the time that documentary was made—the summer of 1967. Lots of his friends were aware of his activities.

Therefore, after the Patterson film was announced, they started bugging him to admit that he’d been the actor in it. Finally, one day, “the fatal temptation to swank” got the better of him (perhaps late at night in the Idle Hour) and he allowed that he’d been in Patterson’s suit. Then word zipped around town in an instant and he was trapped—he couldn’t back out. So he tried to downplay it, not wanting to damage sales of the PGF for Roger Patterson or Patty, and not wanting to get put under the microscope by being forced to answer unanswerable questions. But he enjoyed the mystique it gave him around town to be known as “Bigfoot Bob.”

(Notice, BTW, how thin Heironimus’s account is on details. It lacks the texture of reality. And notice how often the details he has given have gotten him into trouble—which is probably why he’s fought shy of giving them.)

Then, when the TV documentary, The World’s Greatest Hoaxes—Revealed, came out, he was forced to publicly counter its claim that Romney had been the guy in the suit. If he hadn’t, all the folks who had looked up to him for decades as being a Film Star and Man of Mystery would have looked at him quite differently.

Long asked, Why would Heironimus come forward with such a tale, and thereby subject himself to the glare of publicity and ridicule if his story weren’t true? What did he have to gain? (p. 372) That was the wrong question. He should have asked, If Heironimus hadn’t come forward, what would he have lost?

So BH let his lawyer issue a press release. It promised that there would shortly be a press conference where he would release all the details of the hoax and answer questions about it. But that conference was never held. Instead, Heironimus again held back from pushing his case publicly. This is contrary to what he has said in his recent interviews was his motive in coming forward then, namely that he had decided that “It’s time the public knew the truth.” Instead, he held his peace for another five years (2004 – 1999 = 5).

But once again his hand was forced. Greg Long came along and kept bugging him to spill the beans for his book. If he’d hung back, Long would have begun to doubt his tall tale—and maybe issued a very different sort of book. So he had to go along.

After Long’s book was published, things quieted down, after an initial flurry. But now, three years later, Korff has jumped into the fray, forcing BH to be interviewed on Xzone, which led to an interview in a weekly Yakima paper, which led to the Biscardi interview, etc.

By now, Heironimus has probably talked himself into believing (or hoping) it really did happen. Here’s a quote from an expert on lying that describes how social support (like that provided by Long, Korff and McConnell) can bolster the confidence of an initially wobbly yarn-spinner:

QUOTE

The successful lie may support self-deception; in other words, if the lie is believed, then maybe it is not a lie. A man may detail his (largely fictional) history of accomplishments, abilities, and powers. If others act as if they believe him, he then feels “as if” he were the person he has created.
—Charles V. Ford, MD, Lies! Lies!! Lies!!!: The Psychology of Deceit (1996), p. 263

And there are other factors, one or more of which may sooth BH‘s conscience:

1. DeAtley’s spreading the word around his asphalt company that the film was a hoax, starting in 1971 or 1972. (As mentioned by Wolftrax and one other poster here who knew people who worked there then and who reported that “the word around the company” was that DeAtley had confessed to it’s being a hoax.) Such a rumor would have raced around Yakima and convinced BH that he was doing no real harm in claiming to be the actor. This I think is the major factor.
2. His conviction that Bigfoot doesn’t exist,
3. His confidence in the believability of his demeanor—or, failing that, in his ability intimidate any doubter-of-his-tales into holding his peace, rather than “calling him on it.” (But this works only on a person-to-person level, and/or against people who haven't really scrutinized his stories--or who don't want to do so.)
4. His awareness of Patterson’s dodgy character,
5. A hope that, by making this phony claim, he’ll provoke the real actor into coming forward—at which point BH could say that that was his intent all along.
6. A desire to force Gimlin or Pat Patterson to tell the truth (i.e., expose the real ape-suit actor) and thereby save their souls.
7. A desire to besmirch Patterson’s reputation, perhaps to pay him back for some offense committed against him or one of his friends.

QUOTE(Crow Logic @ Aug 7 2007, 07:34 AM) [snapback]400713[/snapback]

But how does anyone suppose Bob Hermonious would have explained Patterson & Gimlin staying in the field as long as they did only to have Hermonious show up on what amounted to the last day or two and shoot a hoax with them.

It's spelled "Heironimus." (Or you can use Rob McConnell's alternative spelling, "Heironeous"--if you're in a teasing mood. RM "misspoke" that pronunciation, supposedly. (I think the angel on his right shoulder got a word in edgewise.))

According to BH's timeline in the Biscardi interview, which utilized a start-date of Sunday, Oct. 1, the film was shot on Thursday, Oct. 5 (presumably allowing time for it to be developed and reviewed for flaws before going public). A filming date of Oct. 5 matches up nicely with the claim in Long's book, p. 350, that P&G faked the tracks a week or two before their announcement on Oct. 20 (15 days later). He's never claimed that P&G immediately went public with it.

However, he's recently (in the Biscardi interview and this 2nd Xzone one) started claiming that P&G told him that they planned to go to town and announce the filming immediately. (This contradicts his statement in Long's book that he didn't know why they gave him the suit, but guessed that it might have been because they planned to go public. And it directly contradicts what he said Patterson told him when he left for Eureka (p. 350):

QUOTE

BH: “They said [right after the filming] they had to go back and make tracks.”
Long: “In other words, make fake tracks of Bigfoot at the film site?”
BH: “Yes. ‘We have to go back and make them. We’ll either do it today, or tomorrow, and we’re out of here and come home.’”

BH has, I believe, revised his story to meet the objection I raised in my Amazon review, that there'd have been no rationale to give him the suit to transport unless an announcement was imminent. If P&G planned to go home immediately to review the rushes, they would have carried the suit themselves.

Two other awkward patches in BH's story are:

1. It's unlikely that Patterson would have planned to announce the film immediately, as BH now claims, if it had been a hoax. It's more likely he'd have reviewed it for convincingness first, and got it developed in a leisurely fashion, without a suspiciously short timeline and a suspiciously anonymous developer. There was no need for such a short timeline if it had been a hoax. His impetuosity is, to me, a sign of a person who made a genuine find and wasn't concerned with how it would "look" to a suspicious world to have a moonlighting camera-shop employee develop it behind his employer's back.

2. It's hard to think of a reason why Patterson would have immediately abandoned his plan to make an announcement and instead come right home. And it's odd that BH never asked Gimlin, who he encountered fairly often in the years since the filming, "Why the change of plan?" And yet that question would have often bothered him--if his story had been true.

QUOTE(Skeptical Greg @ Aug 7 2007, 10:25 AM) [snapback]400754[/snapback]

However, I have yet to see a rebuttal of BH's story with verifiable evidence.

Below is a link to my post in the “Book Review: The Making of Bigfoot” thread about my interview of Bob Heironimus’s former boss, Don Trammel. It’s verifiable in the sense that a reporter for the Yakima Herald called Trammel and confirmed, in an e-mail to me, which I’ve kept in my mailbox, that he’d said what I claimed he’d said.
http://www.bigfootforums.com/index.php?act...amp;qpid=356748

(Namely that Trammel knew the PG film was a hoax because, long after the filming, outside a grocery store in Wiley City, “Bob’s mama showed me the suit and told me, ‘That’s the suit Bob wore in the Bigfoot movie’!” This of course doesn’t match up with his and her claims that the last they saw of the suit was the day after Bob arrived home with it from Bluff Creek.)

The reporter’s name is Jane Gargas. Contact information: 509-577-7690 (work number) / jgargas@yakima-herald.com / Yakima Herald-Republic / 114 N. 4th Street / Yakima, WA 98901. I’d be delighted if you contacted her—and I wish Rob McConnell had had the sense to check it out in that fashion, instead of deleting my comment about Trammel (and half a dozen other of my comments) from his site.

Here is a post slightly further down in the thread, “How can I document these witness’s statements?”, that explains why I don’t have her confirmation to back up the other interviews I did.
http://www.bigfootforums.com/index.php?act...&pid=357098

QUOTE(Skeptical Greg @ Aug 7 2007, 08:05 AM) [snapback]400724[/snapback]

Where does BH make a claim about a Morris suit ? The Morris suit is a red herring...

On the interview last night he stated that he wore Morris's Dynel suit.
He went along with (signed off on) Long's book, with its conclusion that he wore Morris's suit.
He wore Morris's suit in the Oct. 2005 Cow Camp recreation, where he was photographed alongside Morris in his suit. He allowed Morris to apply dark makeup around his eyes for that re-creation. (A feature missing in his story in the book--but which he surely would have told Long about if it had happened.)
In the Biscardi interview he stated that he wore pillow-padding in the butt, backing up Morris's claim that he did so, although in the Rense interview he denied that any such padding was employed.

QUOTE(Skeptical Greg @ Aug 7 2007, 08:05 AM) [snapback]400724[/snapback]

How do you know when that footage ( with three horses ) was shot ?

Well, Patterson rented the camera in April, and some of the earliest footage was shot seemingly in Yakima in summer, but the Bluff Creek footage of the horses shows fall-foliage colors (intense reds, etc.), so it was at the earliest in the last ten days in Sept. But BH in his Biscardi interview stated that P&G picked up the horse from him on a Sunday around "first October." (In fact Oct. 1 was a Sunday.) He said that he followed down on Wednesday. So it would have been a tight squeeze for P&G to have made a preliminary trip down there, taking BH's horse, then returning and going down again, borrowing Chico a second time. And it's extremely unlikely that BH wouldn't have mentioned P&G's borrowing Chico twice, if it had occurred. Chico is readily identifiable by his forehead blaze and foreleg socks, and he is clearly present in the footage. The footage also shows two other horses.