In answer to the last question from Sean Fokker (sp?), which asked him to confirm that the suit he wore was the six-piece Dynel suit from Morris, BH replied that it was not a six-piece but a three-piece suit.
Morris's suit had 2 hands, 2 feet, 1 head, and 1 "unibody" encompassing both the upper and lower body-segments.
The Patterson-made suit BH described putting on in the book was, he said, "made of three parts. It had the legs. It had a corset or middle piece between the neck and waist. And it had a head." (p. 344) This is presumably what he was referring to in his statement last night. But it doesn't match the Morris suit, which wasn't split at the waist, but up the back. There's no way Morris's suit could be described as a three-piece suit. What three pieces of the Morris suit could he have been referring to? If, as Long speculated, Patterson had already riveted the hands and feet to the Morris suit before BH arrived for a fitting--absurd on its face--then it would have been a two-piece suit.
EDIT: Here's the solution: BH can say, "I misspoke. I meant to say it was a two-piece suit and there were three horses, but I got it crosswired." SOME people will swallow it.
On pages 373-74, Long, apparently trying to paper this "two horses" blunder over, says that BH said (although he is never quoted to this effect elsewhere in the book) that P&G made an earlier trip down to scout out a film site, during which the first three minutes of the film were shot. That would have meant they borrowed and returned his horse Chico twice, because Chico (a horse with a broad blaze and socks on his forelegs) is visible in the first three minutes. But he's never claimed that a double-borrowing occurred, although it would be an interesting fact and not the sort of thing he'd have overlooked.
EDIT: Perhaps BH could claim that P&G must have killed and eaten the third horse before he arrived.
QUOTE(Crow Logic @ Aug 6 2007, 10:34 PM) [snapback]400670[/snapback]
Hermonious says they had 2 horses with them and Bob Gimlin says they had 3 horses. Unless Bob Gimlin's horse trailor could handle 3 horses how did Patterson and Gimlin deal with the 3rd horse? Seems they would have needed 3 horses to get to the Bluff Creek site with Bob Hermonious. I doubt he would have walked while they rode. In any event a one ton pickup truck would have a time pulling a 3 horse trailer through those mountains.
Here is a paragraph from an e-mail Chris Murphy sent me in December 2006, a few days after talking to Bob Gimlin:
QUOTE(Chris Murphy)
I also asked him [Gimlin] about his truck at that time. It was a truck with a large box, 8 feet wide by 11 feet (?) long. You only need about two (2) feet per horse, which are placed in the box sideways - so the box would hold up to five horses. For the three horses they took to Bluff Creek (the pack horse was a Welsh pony by the way) he was able to stack hay all around the horses and a big pile at one end - back end logically - so there was ample food for the horses for a long time.
There was no horse trailer taken, as I have been emphatically informed by Dan Perez in an e-mail of Aug. 9, 2006:
QUOTE(Dan Perez)
THEY DID NOT HAVE A HORSE TRAILER. ONE VEHICLE. A MODIFIED TRUCK, THREE SMALL HORSES AND THE TWO SLEPT ON TOP IN MODIFIED QUARTER. NO HORSE TRAILER. ONE TRUCK.
Go to the Book Review: The Making of Bigfoot thread here:
http://www.bigfootforums.com/index.php?showtopic=4395Or read my Amazon review here (hit page-down four times once you get there):
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/customer-...customerReviewsPPPS: Randi on JREF, relying on Daegling’s argument, stated a few months ago that it would be easy for skeptics to re-create a film of an ape-suited actor with the same IMI as Patty. He added that he wished someone would give JREF a grant to make the attempt.
His is the first Bigfoot research project I’d fund, were I to be reincarnated as a Bigfoot sugar-daddy. In fact, I’d fund a half-a-dozen more such attempts, and then put them together into a half-hour (22 minutes) TV special, “A Barrel of Monkeys.”
It would be great TV. I’d hire all those ignorant, condescending FX guys like Stan Winston to have a crack at it. And let’s not forget Dfoot and Avindair’s sneering costume-designer colleague in Minneapolis. And Daegling's hair-covered, waffle-pattern long-john-ed actor. (He should have no trouble finding an actor who matches Patty's shoulder breadth, according to him.) Their pompous pronuncimentos will make an amusing contrast to their piddling results. Not only that, it would repay my investment ten times over when I sold it to a network.
This is how truth is approached: not by directly and mathematically “proving” ones case, but in a roundabout way, by disproving competing claims. The truth is the last man standing. Anyway, our side doesn’t have to prove its case, merely strengthen it to the point where it has to be taken seriously. Simply by being able to say, “You can’t duplicate it—not remotely,” we’ll have accomplished that goal.
QUOTE(Apeman @ Aug 6 2007, 03:32 PM) [snapback]400598[/snapback]
Don't get me wrong, I'd LOVE to see this sort of work done, and done well, but I see a lot of easy pot-shots to be taken against it.
What I was proposing above wasn't an attempt to validate the PGF, but had a more modest and achievable goal: to invalidate scoftical arguments that, because of the PGF's unknown camera angles and distances to the subject, and because not all limb segments are in the same plane in any one frame, no reasonably accurate estimate of Patty's IMI can be made. What I'm saying is, let them either:
1. Construct several "poser" models on a computer with different IMIs, pose each in half a dozen Patty-like poses, and see if we believers can accurately estimate its IMI; or
2. Impose dots on several frames of the PGF on the relevant joints and show us how they could obtain IMIs in the 60s and 70s, which Coltrane claimed could be achieved.
Daegling, in his disingenuous fashion, argued that, because the elbow joint's location was indeterminate when the arm was straight and viewed mostly from behind (in frames 61 and 72), and that his best guess as to where the elbow was in those frames differed from where it appears in frame 352, when viewed from the side, "the estimates are all over the map" (p. 142). But:
A. The location of the elbow is irrelevant: if the length of the forearm is overestimated, the length of the upper arm will automatically be underestimated. The overall arm length, which is what is needed to compute an IMI, will be unaffected. The same argument applies to difficulties in determining the location of the knee. I.e., it's immaterial that, as Daegling wrote, "the knees are bent throughout the film."
B. The estimates of the location of the end-points of the limb, namely the wrist and shoulder for the arm, and the ankle and hip for the leg, are not all over the map. If he or any scoftic thinks they are, then let him place dots on Patty's limb end-points and show us how "all over the map" they are.
C. If it's a suited actor, then his upper legbone will, following the human norm, be the equal of his lower legbone. Since there are shots of Patty turned to the side, the hip location can be computed from the length of the lower leg, and thus the length of the whole leg can be figured. (It's not a valid retort that it mightn't actually be a human actor, because that implicitly concedes the matter under dispute.)
Daegling further argued that, because the knees are bent and "the subject is walking away from Patterson at some oblique and unknown angle the thigh and lower leg segments are undoubtedly rotated out of the plane of the film. Consequently, lower limb length--expressed in either absolute or relative terms--cannot be reliably ascertained."
OK, let's take Daegling's high and low angle-of-retreat estimates and, using trig, compute an IMI under both estimates. (We can apply the same method of testing high and low range boundary figures for other uncertainties too, to finesse the unknown-quantities argument.) If the computed IMI is way out of human range on both, it's not necessary to ascertain which is correct. It's irrelevant to the main issue: Human or not?
What Daegling is implying is that an accurate relative measurement can't be made in the presence of such unknowns as he described. Well, that's an easily testable proposition, especially in the age of the Internet, as I implied in my previous post, and at the start of this post. He (or we) should rent an apesuit, film a Patty-walk, and show it to panels of IMI-naive estimators. If they (not knowing in advance what the correct human IMI should be) can work out an accurate IMI estimate (i.e., about .70), using trig, or various adjustable-limb 3-dimensional stick figures placed in what seem to them like similar angles and poses, then Daegling's argument that
IMI estimates of any film involving similar unknowns will be flawed and all over the map will be falsified. Then he'll have to come up with something new.
QUOTE(Skeptical Greg @ Aug 6 2007, 04:36 AM) [snapback]400509[/snapback]
QUOTE(SquatchCommando @ Aug 5 2007, 01:11 PM) [snapback]400414[/snapback]
just like the existence of Sas is not dependent on this film, The scenario of Patty being fake does not depend on it being Bob H.
I agree .
Yes, it’s a “false dilemma” to claim that if you disbelieve Bob Heironimus you must accept the PGF as real. But that’s the “forced choice” Greg Long would impose on his readers:
QUOTE(Greg Long @ Rense interview, March 1, 2004)
What it finally comes down to [on the validity of the PGF] is this. Would you rather believe a con artist, or an honest man? The Bigfoot hunters would rather believe a con artist.
No, they’d rather examine the film in depth—and give weight to Gimlin’s character as well. And they'd separate, as they have, disproving BH's claim from validating the PGF.
QUOTE(GF)
The skeptics retort is that the imprecision of estimating limb nodes hidden inside a suit prevents from making any IMI claims. But some metrics just can't be hidden. At least not over hundreds of frames.
See my arguments along the same lines a couple of years ago in the “Limb Ratios from the Patterson Film?”, here:
http://www.bigfootforums.com/index.php?act...amp;qpid=107805http://www.bigfootforums.com/index.php?act...amp;qpid=108699http://www.bigfootforums.com/index.php?act...amp;qpid=111464Here are some extracts from those posts:
QUOTE(RogerKni)
If what you say is true, then you or some other disbeliever, enlisting the aid of a CGI-adept, should be able to create many sets of computer-generated "poser" figures whose limbs and other body proportions have been stretched or shrunk by various percentages. You could play Plastic Man with them, and present each variation in a set of four poses matching various Patty-poses. Then post them here, challenge members to estimate their IMIs and other body proportions, and see how far "off" our estimates are. If you're correct, our estimates should be wildly off. But if our IMI estimates are within 3% of the true figures, as I expect they would be, then you'll have been proven wrong, and your argument that utter precision is needed to enable a meaningful comparison will be out the window.
QUOTE(RogerKni)
That suggests a neat test for those who assert that Patty might have an IM below 80: Post a picture of her with the lines drawn and joint locations marked that enabled you to compute a result below 80. And post a picture of a human (e.g., the Poser figure) with joint-points marked that allowed you to compute an IM above 75. Then let's ask a dozen experts in anthropometrics, primatology, etc., what they think of those positionings. I bet they'd find them almost laughable. (Make that hilarious.)
PS: If they'd like to blur their images to what they think is the PGF's degree of blurriness, they should feel free. It shouldn't affect analysis.
And if they over-blur their images to the point that joints become truly indistinct, they'll have given graphic proof of their shadiness. I.e., we can post an image from the PGF alongside one of their overly blurred images and add a caption saying something like, "Scoftics would have you believe that these two images are equally fuzzy. This demonstrates the degree to which they'll twist the facts to win a debate."
BH, I think, implied or stated that the horsehide was dyed later, or that it was shaved off and hair from an old fur coat glued onto the hide. Pummeling BH about the weaknesses in the horsehide account amounts to beating a dead horse, because BH attributed this account to his brother, who said RP told him that. So BH has lots of wiggle room--he can't be nailed.
A greater objection is that one horse's hide wouldn't be enough to make an ape-suit costume, as one knowledgeable poster here pointed out. But again, BH has deniability, because he merely repeated his brother's claim.
What's implausible is that he'd have worn a costume made of fabric and fine Dynel hairs (Morris's suit) and yet given any credence to a claim that it was horsehide. Leather has a special feel that can't be mistaken for fabric; and horsehair (if it wasn't shaven off) is so coarse that fine Dynel hairs wouldn't have seemed right.
QUOTE(Isbjörn @ Aug 2 2007, 03:51 AM) [snapback]399969[/snapback]
What is also interesting is the almost flat landing of the foot. The foot seem to be stretched out with the sole of the foot almost parallel to the ground, in contrast to humans that land heel-first - at least if used to walking with shoes.
Another feature I'd missed until now!
(Well, perhaps I shouldn't feel too bad--in his descriptions and re-creations, BH missed it too.
)
Notice how there's a sort of bicycle-pedaling motion with the knee when Patty begins to move her foot forward up until when she begins to move it down. This could have been a habit developed to make sure the foot clears any obstacle on rough ground, and to make sure of planting it flat on a broad surface on touchdown. A human-style heel-strike would have risked coming down with all the weight concentrated on a sharp or slippery rock.
A suited actor wouldn't have needed such a high foot-lift to clear the ground, even in clown shoes. And it's doubtful he'd have performed it as smoothly.
A similar justification could explain the way the toes lift up during this phase (to avoid toe-stubbing) and why the toes splay out on touchdown (to broaden surface contact and reduce the chance of slippage).
QUOTE(Drew @ Jul 2 2007, 06:42 AM) [snapback]395385[/snapback]
Should you question Patterson's and Gimlin's story to the same standards as you question Heironimus?
No, because:
1. Gimlin didn't expose the hoax after Patterson stiffed him;
2. P&G have supporting evidence in the form of a film with many irreproducibly realistic details. If BH had similar supporting evidence, flaws in his testimony wouldn't be nearly as important.
Not only that but BH lacks evidence he ought to have, such as:
1. A postal receipt for the film--which he inexplicably discarded, because he never saw Patterson again--so he couldn't have handed it over to him.
2. A photo of the suit, which he or a friend could easily have taken as evidence "that I really did this"--instead of the much weaker method of showing it to the crowd at the Idle Hour.
3.
Detailed backup testimony of the four suit-witnesses. None of them described any features that would distinguish what they saw from a Halloween ape-suit. None of them mentioned breasts, what the face looked like, waders in the legs, a latex chest piece, a back zipper, etc.
4. Evidence of any real effort to collect from Patterson or DeAtley. (E.g., he not only never contacted Patterson, he never contacted a lawyer.)
5. Work-attendance records indicating a three-day absence from work on 10/67. He's declined my invitation to send a draft letter to Boise Cascades HRS Dept. (forwarded to him via Xzone and Kal Korff) requesting his work-attendance records or payroll records. (He was paid by the hour, so absences would be reflected in his paycheck amount.) Instead, Long explained his work absence (in his IBS talk) by saying there was a strike at his employer when he went down for the filming, which was untrue. Presumably BH was the source of that embroidery.
QUOTE(Skeptical Greg @ Jul 2 2007, 12:36 PM) [snapback]395444[/snapback]
But there is nothing in Gimlin's telling of the story to indicate his attention was directed elsewhere while Patterson regained control of his horse..
I agree, which is why I placed this interpretation as a second choice (after "alternatively"). Still, given what we know about the fallibility of witness testimony in fast-acting situations (the intruder-in-the-classroom being a classic), fallible memory on Gimlin's part can't be ruled out either. No doubt many of the mistaken classroom witnesses were/are just as confident about what they saw.
QUOTE(Skeptical Greg @ Jul 2 2007, 12:36 PM) [snapback]395444[/snapback]
RogerKni: What life-threatening situation ?
The no-threatening-behavior quotations you gave described Gimlin's attitude after Patty began her retreat. But they are irrelevant to what he faced when Patterson was dismounting at the moment of the encounter. Queen Kong was facing them from under 30 feet away and the horses were acting up. It would have been difficult for Gimlin to get off an accurate shot from a rifle in a scabbard under those circumstances. (That's why Gimlin dismounted later--to ensure a good shot if Patty turned back toward them.)
Gimlin would have had no idea what to expect next--a charge was a good possibility. If so, it could have been upon him within two seconds. The ordinary person in that situation would have been fully focused on a potentially mortal threat. Gimlin was an unusually cool customer and was able to keep his head and retain his awareness--or so he implies. I wouldn't be surprised if he was more alarmed than he let on. (Another un-hoaxer-like behavior. If Patterson had given him a script, it would probably have included the line, "I was scared ****less.")
What I think happened is that after Patterson slid off the horse (as Gimlin said) it stepped on Patterson's foot while Patterson was holding its reins and struggling to retrieve his camera from a saddlebag. Later RP decided to spice up that story (with a dramatic film in mind, perhaps) by claiming the horse fell on him and trapped his foot. How the stirrup got bent is problematic:
1. Patterson used it as an anvil when pounding a nick out of his knife and accidentally bent it, or dumped one of his saddle-boxes on it in the truck later;
2. Patterson deliberately bent it to back up his dramatic tale.
Alternatively, Gimlin was so focused on the creature that he developed the "tunnel vision" that is a feature of life-threatening situations. (Participants in gunfights report this.)
In ordinary crimes, it's suspicious when two suspects have alibis that don't match, but that's because the alibi was an afterthought. E.g., the suspects may have agreed to say they went to the movies together--but not which movie they saw, or whether they bought popcorn, etc. They didn't expect to be caught; their focus was on the crime.
But in the case of an elaborate and expensive (time-and-effortwise) hoax, the crime and the alibi are identical. Full focus would have been on "getting their stories straight." So I don't see this as incriminating, because it's the sort of blatant discrepancy that would have been ironed out beforehand in such a serious, long-incubated hoax. Only flatfoot types--the Gregsons and Lestrades of the world--lack the subtlety to see this. The judicious can appreciate the distinction.
Furthermore, as I've pointed out at greater length earlier, Gimlin was well aware of Patterson's version, but deliberately contradicted it, and then declined the opportunity implicit in the interviewer's reminder of what RP had said to retract of qualify his claim. E.g., he didn't say anything like, "Oh, well maybe I was looking elsewhere." No: he claimed he saw the whole event clearly. A hoax-participant wouldn't have done that.
(BH OTOH would have retracted or qualified his claim, you can be sure. Listen to him in the Biscardi interview revising his claim so that Patterson now said that he planned to go to the media right after the filming, instead of weeks later, and especially revising his emphatic claim that "I didn't drag my foot--never!" to "Well, not deliberately," a few seconds later, after the MKD's stabilized video of previously obscured footage showed Patty scouring the embankment deeply with her feet.)
QUOTE(Roger Knights @ e-mail to Lyle Laverty, July 6, 2006)
I recently read (but have mislaid my printout) that you said that you had come past the Patterson film site only days before you discovered the tracks there on Oct. 21, and that there were no tracks there then. I'd greatly appreciate it if you would confirm (or disconfirm) that you said that, and give me an estimate of how many days prior to Oct. 21 that might have been. Was it less than a week, for instance?
Note: He actually visited the tracks on Monday, the 23rd, as he told Meldrum in an interview that was published in
Bigfoot Times that I turned up a week or so after I e-mailed Laverty. Laverty subsequently confirmed this to Dennett.
QUOTE(Lyle Laverty @ e-mail to Roger Knights, July 6, 2006)
As near as I can recall, I passed by the site on either Thursday the 19th or Friday the 20th. I was part of a timber sale preparation crew working in Bluff Creek the entire summer. We operated out of a portable camp at Notice Creek during the week and returned to Orleans on the weekends.
I hope this helps.... let me know if you have other questions.....
Note: If he passed the site on the 20th, that would presumably have been in the morning, before the filming.
Laverty failed to respond to two sets of follow-up questions, so (fearing that he shunned contact with Bigfooters) I handed them over to Michael Dennett and sic'd him on Lyle. He tracked down Lyle's phone number and interviewed him by phone, and then mailed him a typed-up, numbered transcript of their interview and asked him to initial each item to indicate his agreement. Laverty did so. Michael then sent copies to me and Dan Perez, but asked me not to post the material except in response to questions such as yours. (He's now sent a second set of questions to Lyle's old address in Denver, which hopefully will follow him to DC.)
Unfortunately I haven't been able to put my hand on it, although I know it'll turn up in one of my loose piles the next time I refile everything. But from memory I can tell you that there were four people in his crew (this may have been something he told Dennett orally only, though), and that he and his crew read about Patterson's filming over the weekend and made the decision to go looking for them on Monday. (The next work-day.)
He stated in response to one of the follow-up questions that he and his crew had gone up and down Bluff Creek regularly that summer. (IOW, if the tracks had been laid down weeks before the filming, as BH alleged, it's unlikely they'd have been missed multiple times.)
CL: I'm fuzzy on when BH claimed the mask was a piece of cloth (maybe in the Rense interview), but now he seems to indicate that it was solid. But even if it had been fairly flexible, embedding a prosthetic (plastic) eye in it would have been no problem, because artificial eyes aren't round, but only curved on their outer surface. Their hidden surface is flat. They replicate only the forward quarter or so of an actual eye.
Continuing, in the book BH indicated that RP:
QUOTE(Making of Bigfoot @ p. 403)
molded it into the clay fabric or whatever he used [as a matrix in which to embed the eye], put the eye in there, and turned the eye a little bit, and when I turned my head the eye was lookin' right straight at him.
That implies the pupil of the eye was rotated slightly so it was looking to the right. But how can that be, if there's no pupil visible? Patty's eye, like the eye of a gorilla, and unlike the eye of a human, lacks any "white of the eye" to indicate to an observer which way it's looking. It's brown around the rim. As Bill Miller has pointed out, this means that RP would have had to paint the rim brown, something BH has never mentioned him doing.
PS: Of course, one has to be able to contemplate alternative explanations first, before one can begin to see evidence for them. (IOW, "Data is theory laden.") Long is well-blinkered against any such envisionings.
Here is a quote whose last sentence mentions how clues get missed when there's no framework to hang them on:
QUOTE(Francine Prose @ "Bigfoot Dreams" (1986 novel), p. 161)
Now Vera's thinking back over her visit with the Greens. Why didn't they mention this? You'd think a doctor would be overjoyed by the discovery of a true panacea--until all his training reminded him that it was impossible. Vera reviews Martin's behavior, trying to reinterpret it as that of a man who's just had his whole sense of reality challenged, not just the everyday acting out of Napoleon Bonaparte, MD. Clues must have been dropping everywhere, hers to follow if only she'd known to look.
BTW, the book is full of nonstop clever repartee, fresh expressions, and interesting "slants." (The Amazon reviews, though positive, don't do it justice.) The book treats Bigfoot only as a metaphor for false hopes--at least at first. Vera, the protagonist, is a writer for a supermarket tabloid in the
Weekly World News mold. All the persons and events her stories are completely made up, to avoid the possibility of libel suits.
But the last 32 pages (249-80) are an amusing and fairly respectful description of a conference of "cryptobiologists." Other mentions of Bigfoot are on pages 3, 14, 21, 40, 84, 139, 169, 221, 225, 241 & 246. I'd recommend that any heavy-duty collector of BF material pick up a cheap used copy from Amazon (under $5).
PS: It’s not as though Bob Heironimus was a dead-serious, strictly-business, don’t-speak-out-of-turn sort of guy. He rode a horse into a tavern on a bet, for instance (p. 356). He’s been described to me, admiringly, as “a real liver,” an outgoing life-of-the-party type who would have been tickled pink by Roger Patterson’s prank (as he’d have seen it) and would have wanted to know all about it.
Lyndon: Thanks. It takes a while to really “get into” a scenario and see how it fits together. It’s a lot of work, at least for me. That’s why I was never any good at figuring out “whodunits” when I read detective stories / thrillers as a kid. It takes more than a grasp of the facts, it requires imaginatively reliving the events described to see where, for instance, someone is lying-by-omission.
Although I’d originally tried to avoid making the PGF a focus of my Bigfoot interest, I was motivated to get beneath the surface in this case because of an unusual irritant: On June 23, 2004, out of the blue, I received a taunting e-mail from Greg Long, which read in its entirety, “I’m glad you are expending vast amounts of energy.” (I’d stated on BFF that I was doing so in looking for flaws in his book.) I thereupon said to myself, “You asked for it.”
BTW, Long is the one whose close acquaintance with the case and the character of the claimant should have made him dubious of Heironimus, because his behavior as hoax-participant was often out of character or just plain improbable. He should have imaginatively replayed the events in his mind, while asking himself “Does that make sense?, What am I missing?,” etc.
I suspect any sufficiently large suit would be cumbersome for BH to walk in. I suspect the film of his Cow Camp Caper would reveal how ungainly it was, and that this is the reason Morris has refused to allow Korff to release it on DVD. (According to one of Korff's Xzone interviews a few months back.) Too bad no one asked Morris about why he's keeping the video under wraps in the Biscardi interview. (It can't be because he wants money for it, can it? He's a multi-millionaire. His reputation should be more important to him than a measly $50,000 or so, which is the maximum he'd get from a TV documentary.)
During one of his recent radio interviews, either by McConnell or Biscardi, BH claimed he never asked about any technical details of the suit because he felt it wasn't his place to inquire into such matters. That was RP's concern; he was just a hired hand. That line would be plausible if he were a hit-man for the mob being discreet about his clients' motives, or a small-town druggist "minding his own business," or one of a pair of strangers engaged in some dodgy caper.
But BH was a close friend of Gimlin. It would have been natural for BH to have asked Gimlin such questions--if not at the time, then later, when Gimlin had moved in down the street from him, and was working for the same employer, and had become bitterly estranged from both Patterson and Patterson's wife. He must have had many opportunities to converse with Gimlin, and many pretexts for opening a conversation. (That would be a good question for an interview: How often did you talk to Gimlin in the years after the filming? Wouldn't it have been fairly often, given that you were friends to start with, and then subsequently neighbors, co-workers, and co-victims of Patterson?)
BH has already stated (p. 351) that he "may have"
asked Gimlin when he was going to get paid. Why didn't he pry about the suit THEN? (Another question that should have been asked during the Biscardi interview.) Surely he could have satisfied his curiosity, even if he got no other satisfaction. At least the two of them could have bitched about RP and discussed maybe exposing him or suing him or his estate.
But BH has no good answer to why he kept his distance from Gimlin during the aftermath of the filming, and why the two of them didn't collaborate to at least threaten Pat Patterson with exposure if she didn't "make them whole." (They needn't have actually followed through on this threat, if Gimlin had promised Patterson on his deathbed to keep mum, as BH has alleged in his radio interviews.) BH's need to avoid this sort of question is, I suspect, what led him to imply that his subsequent contact with Gimlin was rare. (I.e., on p. 351 he said, "I tried to run into Roger and Bob a couple times, Bob especially." Yeah, right.)
QUOTE(Ronnie Bass @ Jun 30 2007, 04:51 PM) [snapback]395158[/snapback]
Actually it sounds like he's not sure, awfully strange considering he was "supposedly" the one wearing the suit.
There's a suspicious lack of detail in BH's account. You'd think, for instance, he'd have asked RP, while "BSing" around the campfire in Bluff Creek, or during the Tampico try-on (or try-on
s, depending on which version he's telling), "Hey, what's it made of? Where'd you get it? How much did it cost? Why'd you make those hooters?" Any good old boy would have asked another those questions. His description of the site and suit and walk has been as sparse as possible, probably out of a fear of being tripped up on some detail. I suspect he was advised to Keep It Simple.
But that's caused problems for him too. In order to keep it simple, he claimed there was no rehearsal-walk or second take at Bluff Creek, which is unlikely for such a serious investment of time and effort as RP made. And he initially denied that there was any padding employed in the suit (other than shoulder pads), and he implied there were no hand-extensions employed either. But both these were features of the Cow Camp re-creation--and would have had to have been employed by RP, as Morris realized.
Heironimus vs. Heironimus:
Summary of Story-Changes and Memory Lapses in BH’s Latest (12/7/06) Interview
(on X-Zone radio)
Roger Knights
(Numbers refer to Comments in the X-Zone interview-summary I posted on BFF in the thread, “Making of Bigfoot Book Review”)*****
QUOTE(X-Zone @ 3-5)
They said, “Go on up the road and wait” for ’em. I went on up the road and waited for ’em. They turned, pulled in behind me.
This implies a U-turn, unlike the right turn he implied in Long’s book:
QUOTE(Long’s book @ p. 347)
… Bob come running up and says, “Go on down the road a-ways.” … So I went kind of west out of Willow Creek.
(A right turn is implied above because he was originally driving south on Route 96, which terminates at a T-junction with east/west Route 299 in Willow Creek.)
=============
QUOTE(X-Zone @ 6)
They said, “Follow us on up the mountain here to Bluff Creek,” and we went up there quite a ways.
Here he’s covered his tracks by omitting two stupendous errors he made in Long’s book, which only a man who’d never been there would have made: the direction of the turn after the meetup (it had to be to the
left) and the distance to the site (over 20 miles):
QUOTE(Long’s book @ p. 348)
I followed them. We drove, oh, it seems like to me about three miles out of town, and then we came to Bluff Creek Road and turned to the right and went up into the mountains there about four miles, maybe—five miles.
===============
QUOTE(X-Zone 7)
They had a horse truck—two horses in it.
But three horses are present in the film.
===============
QUOTE(X-Zone 7)
The next morning we got up, saddled the horses, put the suit on the back of one horse. I jumped on the back of Bob or Roger—I don’t remember which …
QUOTE(Long’s book @ p. 348)
Then Gimlin and Heironimus mounted Chico with Heironimus sitting behind Gimlin.
===============
QUOTE(X-Zone 15)
We rode back to camp, I put the suit in the back of the car, my car.
QUOTE(Long’s book @ p. 350)
Patterson and Gimlin … pulled the suit from the sack, and laid it in the trunk of the Buick.
================
QUOTE(X-Zone 17)
I took the film to Eureka, mailed the film, and I took off for home.
QUOTE(Long’s book @ p. 350)
He stayed overnight in Eureka, and he remembered renting a room in a small building whose siding was made of logs. The next day he drove home to Yakima.
================
QUOTE(X-Zone 20)
So I took the suit home. And a couple days later they brought my horse home, took the suit out of the car, …
No,
one day after he arrived home, according to the book:
QUOTE(Long’s book @ p. 351)
He [BH] remembered arriving back at his mother’s house either in the afternoon or evening. While he was (apparently) sleeping, his mother, Opal, opened the trunk …. [“This event occurred about 10:00 A.M.”—(p. 363)—i.e., the next day.] Later, at night [of the day after Heironimus’s return], Patterson and Gimlin removed the suit ….
================
QUOTE(X-Zone 21)
That’s the last I saw of the suit.
QUOTE(”Lie Detector” show @ May 2005)
That’s the last I ever saw of that original Bigfoot suit.
================
QUOTE(X-Zone 22)
After I got back from down there I still had the suit in the car. I went up to the local water hole and some of the boys wanted to know where I’d been the last few days. I took ’em out to the car, I opened the trunk, and I said, “Take a look at this. … Do not forget what this looks like.”
That dramatic scene would have been hard to forget. And his buddies would have reminded him of it if he had asked them to refresh his memory, during the many months that Long was pestering him about whether he had displayed the suit to them. But nooo …:
QUOTE(Long’s book @ p. 405)
Long: “Do you remember talking to the guys at the Idle Hour Tavern?”
BH: “I just don’t remember.” He shook his head. “I just don’t remember.”
================
QUOTE(X-Zone 22)
I said, “Take a look at this. … Do not forget what this looks like.” Well right away, they knew right then, what I’d been doing.
QUOTE(Lie Detector show)
I said just look at this and do not forget what this looks like. Well, two or three weeks later, out came the movie, you know, on the television, the film. They said, ‘Ah ha! That’s what you were doing,’ you know.
QUOTE(Long’s book)
p. 352: It got to a point there after a year and a half of it, that keeping quiet didn’t matter to me.
p. 370: I was supposed to keep my mouth shut. That’s what I was supposed to be paid for. But, you know, after a couple of years, you don’t get any money, things kind of fell out.
QUOTE(X-Zone 36)
I was hoping year after year there that I would get paid. And then, after about four years I decided everybody knew that it was me anyway out where we lived out there.
QUOTE(X-Zone 54)
Like I said, after four or five years, I decided the hell with it ….
Growing like Pinocchio’s nose …
================
QUOTE(X-Zone 41)
Heironimus: Those were irrigation boots, y’know, kinda like irrigators wear, up to about the knees. That’s why the calves stick out pretty good there.
QUOTE( Long’s book @ p. 344)
I … slipped my legs into the legs of the suit, which felt like they were hip boots or wading boots, you know, these long boots that go up to your waist.
================
QUOTE(X-Zone 50)
Heironimus: My nephew was there and he was about eight years old … and he put the head of the suit on and went into the house to see if he could scare somebody.
QUOTE(John Miller (nephew) @ in Long’s book, p. 365)
I can remember going up to their front porch and looking in the front window to see if somebody could see me. I was going to try to scare somebody.
================
He’s muffing his lines.
QUOTE(Heironimus 45)
Heironimus: Well, the truth’s the truth.
(edit)
QUOTE(Heironimus 46)
Rob McConnell: Bob, when you go on TV shows and radio shows, and meet other members of the print media, how do they treat your story?
Heironimus: They treat it with respect. I think that 99% of them want the truth.
(edit)
QUOTE(Heironimus 47)
Rob McConnell: Now here you are, the gentleman who’s come clean and said, I was the guy in the Bigfoot suit,” you’ve passed two lie detector tests, and still people say, “Nah, you didn’t.” How do you feel when you hear people saying, “No you were not there,” when you know you were there?
Heironimus: Well, y’know, it’s kinda upsetting, but listen, they’re [Bigfoots] supposed to have been spotted in [many states] and Canada, there’s supposed to be over 2000 of ’em. And the people who saw these, or claim they saw these, none of ’em ever shot one or had a camera or could find any DNA. They say the [1958 Bluff Creek] footprints were fake. Anybody can make a footprint. Well, it doesn’t take a genius to really figure this thing out.
QUOTE(Heironimus 48)
Rob McConnell: Bob, do you believe in Sasquatch?
Heironimus: No, no. There’s thousands and thousands and thousands of people in the mountains from Canada to Happy Camp, Bluff Creek, all that area, every day. Thousands, and once in a while somebody will say they got a glimpse of something that looks like a Bigfoot. I don’t think so. There has been no DNA found, no bones, no captures, no killings. And there’s supposed to be 2000 of ’em. Surely somebody would have bagged one by now.
I’m suspect this is part of what makes it OK in his mind to make his phony claim. He figures Patterson and Gimlin
have to be lying, so where’s the harm in “exposing” them? (Even if one has to skew the facts a bit to do so.)
Harry Kemball, who unconvincingly claimed ten years ago on McConnell’s show that Patty was really an actor who was “Patterson’s extra-tall buddy” (i.e., not Heironimus), was also a strong disbeliever in Bigfoot. I think this opinion also influenced him in embroidering his memory: He stated, “As a graduate in comparative anatomy studies this creature does not and has never existed.” (Quoted in Murphy’s
Meet the Sasquatch, p. 89)
QUOTE(Heironimus 49)
Rob McConnell: So what does it feel like to be the world’s only living Sasquatch?
Heironimus: Well, I was 26 years old when I made the film and I’ll be 66 pretty soon so it’s no big deal.
Rob McConnell: Bob, what would you like to tell the listeners who are listening to us around the world tonight?
Heironimus: I’d like to tell ’em that it was me in the Bigfoot suit in the Roger Patterson film in 1967. It was a hoax.
Fool us once, shame on him. Fool us twice, shame on us. He can “tell” us all he wants, but we would be foolish to believe him again, after he “fooled us once” with his self-serving lie that he hadn’t discussed or displayed the suit at the Idle Hour upon his return. (See Long’s book, pp. 370-71) He changed his story (on the
Lie Detector show) only after critics located witnesses who said they’d been shown the suit.
QUOTE(Heironimus 50)
Rob McConnell: What did the family think at the time, and what do they think now?
Heironimus: My mother opened the trunk of the car. … My nephew was there and he was about eight years old … and he put the head of the suit on and went into the house to see if he could scare somebody. And my aunt—she’s no longer alive—she saw the suit.
A minor objection first: in Long’s book, the nephew only
looked into the house:
QUOTE(John Miller)
I can remember going up to their front porch and looking in the front window to see if somebody could see me. I was going to try to scare somebody.
Second, Long’s relatives saw only
A suit—no details that would have identified the suit as being Patty were provided in Long’s book, so they can’t be said to have seen
THE suit.
BTW, Heironimus didn’t answer the question “What did the family think at the time, and what do they think now?” Possibly he didn’t want to bring Miller into the spotlight, where the suspicious sparseness of his testimony (“It stank”—p. 365), and his suspicious “bashfulness” about answering further questions would become more apparent. His mom’s description of what she saw (or what Long chose to print of it) was also suspiciously sparse. (“It had a hairy, dark-colored face”—pp. 363-64.)
QUOTE(Heironimus 51)
Rob McConnell: When you see pictures on the Internet or in books or in newspapers of you in the suit, how’s it make you feel?
Heironimus: Well, it makes me upset a little bit because I know it’s me, the family knew it was me, Roger Patterson’s family, some of them, knew it was me, it upsets me a little bit, this keeps dragging on and on.
“The family knew it was me.” Did they really? Are
John Miller and
Opal Heironimus willing to instruct Long to make their interview tapes public, or at least let them be reviewed by a discreet neutral party like leading Bigfoot skeptic Michael Dennett, who’s agreed to do so? Wouldn’t it be suspicious if they won’t? After all, Korff stated on the show, “We have nothing to hide.”
QUOTE(Heironimus 52)
Rob McConnell: He’s been asked by people, “Well, how can you prove it?” “Well, wait a second,” he says. “My mother saw the suit, members of my family saw the suit, my buddies at the drinking hole saw the suit, and [stressed] everybody knew that I, Bob Heironimus, is Bigfoot.”
Would his buddies be willing to take lie detector tests as to what they saw and when they saw it? I’d pay. The key questions would be:
• Did you all see the suit in one another’s company, or at least at a time when others were present in the bar?
• Were you shown the suit outside the Idle Hour, or was it somewhere else?
• Was it daylight?
• Had you heard talk of the suit before you saw it?
• Had you heard about Patterson’s famous Bigfoot movie before you saw the suit?
• Did you ask to see details of the suit or were you satisfied with a peek at a pile of fur?
• What details of the suit do you remember?
It’s suspicious that Heironimus didn’t mention about his buddies seeing the suit in the first place—i.e., in Long’s book. That had to be dragged out of him.
QUOTE(Heironimus 53)
Rob McConnell: Does anybody call you a Bigfoot or a Sasquatch in the community?
Heironimus: Oh yeah, yeah, everybody.
Korff: In fact, tell them what your nickname is, ’cause you sign it all the time.
Heironimus: Bigfoot Bob.
As a result of his claim, Heironimus has become a “Somebody” in his community. He’s not just a Pepsi driver—he’s an International Film Star and Man of Mystery. In other words, he’s raised his status. Status is a strong motivator in human affairs. It’s right up there with money and sex.
QUOTE(David Lieberman’s 1998 book @ "Never Be Lied to Again," p. 115)
A primary law governing human nature is that we all have a need to feel significant.
Some people will do almost anything to raise their status. They’re not above spin a yarn or two—and not only to others, but even to themselves.
QUOTE
Question from Jeff in Orlando: I just want to thank him …. It’s so wonderful to hear everything you’re saying.
Rob McConnell: Well, that’s what we’re here for, to get both sides of the coin out there and let the audience decide whether it’s true or not. But here we’ve got the guy who was in the suit saying, “It’s me, this is how it happened, this is why I did it, this is what’s been happening over the last 35 years and why I’ve decided to tell the world is because this.” Isn‘t that what the media is supposed to do?
Jeff: This is incredible that you’re finally coming forward with all this information.
’Tis new to thee.
QUOTE(Heironimus 54)
Well, it’s time that people knew the truth. It’s time a long time ago. I just waited hopefully. I didn’t want to stir up anyone, hoping that one of these years I‘d get paid. Like I said, after four or five years, I decided the hell with it, I’m not going to be paid, so I might just as well tell the truth.
“Four or five” is a variation from the “three or four” he used in Comment #36, which in turn was a variation from the “one or two” in p. 350 of Long’s book.
QUOTE(Heironimus 55)
Rob McConnell: Bob it’s been a pleasure having you and thank you for setting the record straight, here on the X-Zone. I do hope that I’ll have the pleasure of talking to you in the future, sir.
Heironimus: Any time.
Let’s hope there
is a follow-up interview in which hardball questions are asked—and straight answers are required. I’ve sent 50 such questions to the show.
On the night of 12/7/06 (blending into the early morning hours of 12/8) Bob Heironimus and Kal Korff appeared for the last two hours of the radio talk show X-Zone, hosted by Rob McConnell. It is carried on the Internet and is archived on the X-Zone site at
http://www.xzone-radio.com/december2006.htm. (Scroll down to Dec. 7.) Much of the talking was done by Korff, whose remarks I’ll post later.
Here are 55 comments by Heironimus. I’ve numbered each quote box for ease of reference. I’ve interrupted the flow to intersperse my comments from time to time, and I’ve boldfaced topic phrases or crucial claims in Heironimus’s narrative. I wrote down over 90% of what was said, skipping the inconsequential or repetitive stuff. In five instances I’ve shifted a question-and-answer pair out of its original sequence, so that I could “group” together comments on the same topic.
This amounts to 25 single-spaced printed pages, or 38 screenfuls,
so it’s probably too long to read in a single sitting. At least not without a pot of coffee. I suspect this is a new record-length for the site, breaking my old record.
(BTW, I hope someone will post a complete transcript of Heironimus’s remarks on the Nat. Geo. show—the one where he stated that Patterson filmed the PGF from horseback. We need to get this guy on the record as much as possible.)
===================================
QUOTE(Heironimus 1)
Rob McConnell: Bob, I had the pleasure of talking to you off-air. Tell us how you met Roger Patterson. Were you the man in the costume?
Heironimus: Yes, sir, I was. Gimlin said they were going to make a movie of this Bigfoot suit. He said they were going to sell it to the movie people and make a lot of money. He asked me to see Patterson, so I went to his place. [This was described on p. 143 in Long’s book, if you’re following along.]
He said, “We’ll give you $1000 to wear the suit—it won’t take over ten minutes.” So I agreed to do it. I tried the suit on at his place a couple of times. They needed somebody big and strong like I am.
This “a couple of times” is a significant change from the book, where only one try-on was described, after which Patterson said, “That’s perfect,” implying that no more try-ons were necessary. (p. 346) So why has Heironimus added a second try-on?
Maybe because he (or one of his advisors) realized it would make a more believable account if there was a second fitting. It’s implausible that his suit fit tightly without it. But revising his story in mid-stream like this, for a self-serving reason, only makes his account
less believable. Or, more likely, he just can’t keep the details of his story straight—because he invented them and they have no roots in a real memory.
QUOTE(Heironimus 2)
Heironimus: They wanted me to meet them at Weitchpec, California on a Wednesday. They left on a Sunday. They came to my place, took one of my horses, and took off. Wednesday I met Roger and Bob at Weitchpec. I pulled into this gas station where they said they would be.
First, Weitchpec is impossible, because there was no gas station on the left-hand side of the road (where Heironimus had repeatedly placed it, according to Long) in Weitchpec in 1967 (or now), as Long conceded (on p. 438).
Second, Weitchpec is quite a story-change from “They told me … to go to … Willow Creek” (p. 347). It’s 23 road-miles north of Willow Creek.
Third, it’s also a story change from the location Long claimed Heironimus said they met up: a store 4.6 miles north of Weitchpec. (After Heironimus abandoned Willow Creek, because it sunk his story, being too far from the film site):
QUOTE
He [Heironimus] remembered quite clearly rendezvousing at a
grocery store near the Bluff Creek Road turnoff.
—Greg Long, point 5 of Rebuttal to Green’s “Responding to the Korff article,” online at
http://www.northwestmysteries.com/makingof...05REV_13_05.pdfThis “grocery store near the Bluff Creek Road turnoff,” was known as “The Bluff Creek Company store.” It was only a mile south of the Bluff Creek Road turnoff, and would have made sense as a meetup spot because of that proximity. But it was an isolated building (and also its primary business was groceries, not gas). Heironimus couldn’t have confused a meetup there with a meetup in a town, so it’s impossible too.
Fifth, “Sunday” conflicts with what he said in Long’s book (p. 343):
QUOTE
I think Roger and Bob left on a Friday or Saturday.
QUOTE(Heironimus 3)
They said, “Go on up the road and wait” for ’em. I went on up the road and waited for ’em.
This is a black/white change, verbally anyway, from what he said in Long’s book:
QUOTE(Heironimus 4)
… Bob come running up and says, “Go on down the road a-ways.”
“Up” conventionally often means north (from its position on a map), and would in the context here imply a doubling back on his tracks.
QUOTE(Heironimus 5)
They turned, pulled in behind me.
This clinches my argument that a reversal of direction was made. Heironimus spoke the word “turned” in a rapid mutter, as well he might, because it’s a substantive, black/white story change. The BCR turnoff is north of Weitchpec (and also north of the BCC store). It’s back “up” the road, so words indicating a U-turn are necessary to make his story mesh with “the facts on the ground.” A true story in which a meetup occurred in Weitchpec must include mention of it—which is why it is so damning that Heironimus’s original version didn’t.
Instead, back when he thought the BCR turnoff was
beyond the meetup spot in Willow Creek, Heironimus omitted any mention or implication of a turn-around. Instead the map he drew (pp. 366-67) indicated a
right-hand turn, not a
return. It’s impossible for him to have confused a right turn onto another road with doubling back on the original road. A U-turn’s difference from a right-hand turn is not a matter of degrees—it’s
essentially different. It involves
turning backward (relative to the road); any other turn involves
continuing forward (relative to the road).
Long tried to pass their differences off as merely a matter of orientation: “He said he drove west, when actually he drove north. He got that mixed up because he confused Willow Creek with Weitchpec.” (p. 441) But reorienting the map by 90 degrees so that he was going north after a right-hand turn won’t resolve what’s wrong with Heironimus’s version: that he claimed he made a right-hand turn onto
another road, not a U-turn
back the way he came.
It’s remotely possible that Heironimus’s other major blunders about the route to the filmsite could be explained away somehow, but not this one. There’s no wiggle room here. If he’d made a U-turn, he’d have drawn a U-turn. He’d
never have drawn anything else. We’ve all been advised, “Never say ‘never,’” but I’ll say it again:
Never.
QUOTE(Heironimus 6)
They said, “Follow us on up the mountain here to Bluff Creek,” and we went up there quite a ways. And they had a camp set up there and I drove my mom’s car down there. I had a race car at that time and it wouldn’t get very good gas mileage, so I drove her new car down there. We hid the car in the brush and went to camp.
Here he’s fuzzed over his initial gross blunder—his claim that the 20-plus-mile distance to the filmsite was actually “four miles—maybe five miles.” (p. 348) But an honest man wouldn’t have tried to fuzz things over—he’d have openly owned up to his mistake. Heironimus is doing what a scheming man would do—performing “damage control” to protect his image. (This is similar to what he’s done in his Comment #5 above, and Comments 30 & 31 below.)
However, realistically, he couldn’t openly acknowledge his error. He’s foreclosed that option with the last phrase in his initial estimate, “four miles—
maybe five miles.” The last three words imply that he was so aware of distances that he could estimate them accurately to within half a mile. His attempt to make it look like he was really there by being ultra-precise about the mileage has, ironically, prevented him from excusing himself by claiming, “Well, I was just making a stab in the dark,” or “my memory is fuzzy.” His false precision has exposed him as a phony, given that he was actually “off” by 15 miles.
A minor objection is that Patterson & Gimlin would have had to also hide the truck in the brush, which would have required a large clearing for the two vehicles. Did Patterson & Gimlin have a chainsaw with them to clear away a parking apron?
QUOTE(Heironimus 7)
They had a horse truck—two horses in it.
……………………..
The next morning we got up, saddled the horses, put the suit on the back of one horse. I jumped on the back of Bob or Roger—I don’t remember which …
There were two dark-colored riding horses present. But the film also shows a white pony, possibly a Welsh pony (according to Gimlin (statement 12/06 to Chris Murphy)), probably too small for riding down and up an incline, especially with a load on back. And Heironimus says there were only two horses down there. So what happened to the pony? Did Patterson & Gimlin eat it before Heironimus arrived? Did it run off? What?
(On p. 374 of Long’s book Heironimus claimed that Patterson & Gimlin took three horses down on a first, scouting-out, trip, and two horses down on a second trip. But, since he’s no longer claiming that the first three minutes were shot prior to the trip in which he participated (i.e., he’s claiming that his horse Chico appears in that footage—see Comment #9, below), that doesn’t answer the question I posed above: Why didn’t he report that there was a third horse present?
If Heironimus claims that the white horse was ridden by Patterson and that there were only two horses present, then it makes it hard to credit his statement that he didn’t remember on whose horse he jumped. Further, a denial that three horses were in the footage could be disproved by photo analysis of the two larger horses, I presume.
BTW, there’s no mention in this account of the sack the suit was stored in, unlike in the book. (p. 348)
QUOTE(Heironimus 8)
—and we rode up to where they had a film site picked out.
“Up”? “UP?” The filmsite was
down an incline—a steep incline.
QUOTE(Heironimus 9)
Korff: Can you confirm that your horse is visible in the Patterson film?
Heironimus: Yes, my horse is in that, yes.
I’ve recently learned, from Chris Murphy, that this is true—Gimlin has confirmed it to him. This means that my BFF post, “A Horse of a Different Color,” is partly wrong and will have to be revised. But it’s also partly correct, because it still poses an awkward question for Heironimus: Why did he claim that only two horses were involved when he was there (see Comment #7) although three horses are in the film?
(They aren’t all shown together, because the photographer was mounted on the third one. Maybe that didn’t occur to Heironimus, and that’s why he thought there were only two horses.)
He can no longer claim that that cowboy footage was shot on an earlier trip, because the timeline he’s given won’t allow room for one. (See my timeline analysis in Comment #20.) An earlier trip would had to have been a week earlier than the first-week-of-October date Heironimus gave (see Comment #13), i.e., it would have been around September 22. But that would have been before the foliage turned as intensely red as it appears in the film. Such a trip would have been logistically unnecessary and unaffordably expensive.
QUOTE(Heironimus 10)
I put the suit on and Roger told me, “Now stand over here. When I give you the signal, you start walking down through here.”
A minor misstep—he should have said, “
We put the suit on.” (See Comment 30 for his description of that three-man effort.)
QUOTE(Heironimus 11)
I’d already practiced, you know, at his place before and he said that was perfect. So I stood over there, he told me to start walking, and I started walking down there in the Bigfoot gait.
It’s implausible that there wasn’t at least one practice walk at the site, since it had be threaded between trees and around debris, and since Heironimus had never walked on that sort of soft soil before. Not to have spent five minutes doing so in an otherwise well-planned, high-effort, serious commercial hoax is very unlikely.
QUOTE(Heironimus 12)
And I turned once or twice and looked at him and he said, “That’s it, cut.”
“
Or twice” is improbably vague. He’d have remembered the count if he actually made those turns. (It’s the opposite error from his being over-precise about the distance he drove up Bluff Creek Road. But the cause in both cases is the same—he didn’t do what he claims, but is trying—and failing—to sound authentic.)
And Patterson would have had to yell, loudly, not just “
say,” to be heard at a distance of 100 yards, over a babbling brook. (See the route-map on p. 88 of Krantz’s
Bigfoot/Sasquatch Evidence)
It’s interesting that he didn’t mention crossing the creek this time. He shouldn’t have mentioned it the first time, because it’s a senseless act. (It is, suspiciously, in agreement with an out-of-sequence description Patterson once gave of Patty’s course of travel in an interview. Patty actually crossed the creek after the film had run out.)
QUOTE(Heironimus 13)
And so I—it was really hot. I was sweating to death. It was in the—around the first October—and I jumped in this big hole behind a tree that had blown over. I was afraid of getting shot all this time—October—starting the hunting season.
Finally he’s put a date on his trip, which makes it less frustrating for me to compute timelines. (If only he’d done so in Long’s book!) However, the date of the filming would have to be four days later, on Oct. 5, in order to mesh with Heironimus’s claim (on the
Lie Detector show) that the film came out only “two or three weeks later” he returned to Yakima. Sunday, Oct. 1 would have been the day Patterson & Gimlin borrowed his horse. (See Comment #2.)
QUOTE(Heironimus 14)
So I jumped down this hole, told ’em to get this thing offa me. They stripped the suit offa me, we loaded it back up. This was about 11 o’clock, 12 o’clock in the morning.
I believe an analysis of the shadows (I think by Dahinden, and maybe also by others) has established that the film was shot in the afternoon. (Someone please give me a source for these studies if you know it.) If this could be firmed up it would be another nail in Heironimus’s coffin.
No mention of the suit’s sack here, unlike p. 350 of Long’s book.
QUOTE(Heironimus 15)
We rode back to camp, I put the suit in the back of the car, my car.
This “
I put the suit” is at variance with p. 350 of Long’s book, wherein Long stated:
QUOTE(Heironimus 16)
Patterson and Gimlin … pulled the suit from the sack, and laid it in the trunk of the Buick.
Notice that Heironimus still isn’t mentioning the sack, unlike in the book.
QUOTE(Heironimus 17)
Roger said take this film—he had an envelope there—to Eureka, California and mail it to Al DeAtley. I took the film to Eureka, mailed the film, and I took off for home.
That statement contradicts p. 350 of Long’s book:
QUOTE(Heironimus 18)
He stayed overnight in Eureka, and he remembered renting a room in a small building whose siding was made of logs. The next day he drove home to Yakima.
QUOTE(Heironimus 19)
They wanted me to take the suit because when they broke the news down there they didn’t want … they had to carry their gear in the back of the [open] truck—they didn’t want people seeing the suit.
But, since they didn’t announce the filming to the press until two weeks later, on Oct. 20, on a separate trip down, there’d have been no concern about the suit being seen on Oct. 6. Heironimus would have aware of that no announcement was imminent, because he stated in Long’s book that he was told by Patterson just before he left the for Eureka, “We have to go back and make them [tracks]. We’ll either do it today, or tomorrow, and we’re out of here and come home.” (p. 350)
(BTW, this time around Heironimus omitted mentioning Patterson’s supposed track-making the next day, given that a credible witness to the contrary, former Forest Service official Lyle Laverty, has recently turned up. He passed the film site Oct. 19, in the company of several other witnesses, and detected no tracks there then, although there were nearly 100 the next day. See my article, “Bob Heironimus's Fake-Track Claim is Discredited by Filmsite Witness Lyle Laverty” in
Bigfoot Times 9/06, or in my post on BFF at:
http://www.bigfootforums.com/index.php?s=&...t&p=343705)But, assuming for the sake of argument that Patterson & Gimlin
were going to announce the filming immediately:
• In Long’s book Heironimus said they had a sack they carried it in (pp. 348 & 350), which would have concealed it. (Probably a desire to make his new claim that carrying it themselves would have exposed the suit seem plausible is the reason Heironimus dropped mention of the suit in Comments 7, 14 & 16.)
• Or they could have stashed the suit-sack in the woods just beyond the BCR roadhead and conveniently picked it up the night they left, when the hoopla had died down—no one would have been the wiser.
• Or they could have mailed the costume home by parcel post from Eureka before the announcement. Although awkward, that would obviously have been much safer than letting Heironimus get hold of it.
QUOTE(Heironimus 20)
So I took the suit home. And a couple days later they brought my horse home, took the suit out of the car, …
No,
one day after he arrived home, according to the events in the book. (pp. 347-51) (I’ve affixed Heironimus’s radio-interview Oct. 1 date and days of the week):
• Sunday, Oct. 1: Patterson & Gimlin pick up Heironimus’s horse Chico (on “Sunday”—see Comment #2) and depart for CA. (This agrees with conventional wisdom about the PGF: that Patterson & Gimlin left Yakima on Oct 1—or anyway that they were down in California for three weeks before filming Patty.)
• Wednesday, Oct. 4: Heironimus leaves Yakima, arrives in Bluff Creek at 5pm, and sleeps in Patterson & Gimlin’s camp.
• Thursday, Oct. 5: Heironimus does his Patty-walk, drives to Eureka (a two hour journey at least), mails the film, and stays overnight in a local motel.
• Friday, Oct. 6: Heironimus arrives in Yakima in the late afternoon or evening (after an 11-hour journey), goes to the Idle Hour, and returns to his mom’s.
• Saturday, Oct. 7: Heironimus sleeps in until the afternoon; his mom and nephew discover the suit at 10am. “Late that night” Patterson & Gimlin return the horse and retrieve the suit (p. 365)—
one day after Heironimus arrived in Yakima. (Or let’s say 30 hours at the maximum, if Heironimus arrived in Yakima at 6pm Friday and Patterson & Gimlin retrieved the suit on midnight Saturday.)
Perhaps Heironimus is trying to carve out a longer time window when he had the suit in his custody, to try to shoehorn in some of the suit-witnesses I’ve located. His omitting his overnight stay in Eureka could be part of this strategy.
QUOTE(Heironimus 21)
… and that’s the last I saw of the suit.
Then how come he didn’t see it when he showed it off subsequently (on separate occasions): to his brother Mike (and Mike’s wife), to Garry Record, and to Bernard Hammermeister? Did he turn his blind eye to it, like Lord Nelson?
On the
Lie Detector show his wording was tantalizingly different. He said, “That’s the last I ever saw of that
original Bigfoot suit.” He also alluded to a possible second suit in the book. (p. 352) This gave him wiggle room: He could explain away after-the-fact suit witnesses as not having seen the genuine article.
But, of course, it’s highly suspicious that he didn’t come clean about this second suit in the first place, and instead tried to “put one over” on us by being coy about its existence. That’s what a phony claimant would do: initially try to make his story look more credible than it really is, and reserve himself a fallback position to which he could beat a retreat if things got hot. If Heironimus concealed the truth about his long-time ape-suit prankster activity to “sell” his story, who can have faith that his entire story isn’t also being fabricated?
Korff wrote in his
Skeptical Inquirer review that Heironimus “has made a
full confession.” But Heironimus didn’t actually “open the kimono,” but is instead doing the dance of the seven veils, teasingly making admissions as new facts come to light, and concurrently adding embroidery to certain details, becoming vague about others, and varying still more. It’s good entertainment—but that’s all.
QUOTE(Heironimus 22)
After I got back from down there I still had the suit in the car. I went up to the local water hole and some of the boys wanted to know where I’d been the last few days. I took ’em out to the car, I opened the trunk, and I said, “Take a look at this. … Do not forget what this looks like.” [Stressing his next sentence:] Well right away, they knew right then, what I’d been doing.
But this is a different and more dramatic version of what he claimed on the
Lie Detector show, where he stated:
QUOTE
I said just look at this and do not forget what this looks like. Well, two or three weeks later, out came the movie, you know, on the television, the film. They said, ‘Ah ha! That’s what you were doing,’ you know.
Questions:
• Was it daylight when he showed the suit?
• Did he show the suit off once, to a group, as seems implied above, or several times, to different individuals?
QUOTE(Heironimus 23)
At least six of those guys saw the suit.
He’s embellishing what he told me on 4/10/06, which was: “
Only six guys saw the suit.” That was when he was implicitly denying that Trammel, Lenington, and Record had seen the suit, after I’d mentioned their names and claims to him.
QUOTE(Heironimus 24)
And the word spread. Two weeks after the film came out on television, 50 to 100 people in that community out there knew it was me.
He’s again embellishing what he told me on 4/10/06, which was: “
Within a year 50 folks in town knew that I’d been in the suit.”
QUOTE(Heironimus 25)
Rob McConnell: Did you ever think when you were inside the suit that this [TV exposure of the film] was going to happen?
Heironimus: No, it didn’t matter to me. They said they were going to sell it. … As long as I got the thousand bucks, I didn’t care what they done with it. Y’know, ten minutes work.
It would have been “ten minutes work” only if Patterson & Gimlin had driven to his place and filmed him in his own backyard. But in reality Heironimus had to drive to California, he lost three day’s pay (he was paid by the hour, according to Hank Pieti), spent 24 hours on the road (11 each way driving to California and back according to Google Maps, plus two hours driving to Eureka from Bluff Creek), paid for travel expenses, had to fix a scratch on his mom’s car, and took the risk of getting shot by hunters. (Plus Patterson probably no doubt stiffed him for postage on the film!)
The likely reason Heironimus minimized his investment in this effort was to make it seem believable that he didn’t press Patterson for his $1000. That would also have been his rationale for telling Long that his employer was on strike at the time.
QUOTE(Heironimus 26)
Rob McConnell: And $1000 back in 1967 was a considerable amount of money.
Heironimus: Yes it was, yes it was.
So why didn’t he even write a postcard to Patterson or his widow requesting repayment? Or consulted a lawyer? Afraid to say boo to a goose?
QUOTE(Heironimus 27)
Rob McConnell: Did anybody take any photos of the camp?
Heironimus: Uh, there’s some photos I think of the camp, yes. I didn’t take any photos. Seems to me like I saw somebody had some uh—Bob or Roger or somebody came up with a—have a picture of the camp.
This implies that he might have had subsequent contact with Patterson. But in Long’s book he implied he hadn’t. (pp. 351-52)
QUOTE(Heironimus 28)
Rob McConnell: What kind of man was Patterson?
Heironimus: Well, Roger wasn’t too honest. He screwed me out of 1000 bucks, and numerous, numerous other people. He was kinda what you might call a con man.
By 1967 Patterson’s reputation as a deadbeat was well established. And Heironimus wasn’t a kid of 16—he was 26 years old, and hadn’t led a sheltered life. So, knowing Patterson’s reputation, why didn’t Heironimus ask him for some surety until he was repaid, such as the suit or an incriminating photo? That would have cost Patterson practically nothing.
As for Patterson’s being a con man, that doesn’t follow except verbally. I.e., if someone fails to repay a debt, we consider that cheating, and nowadays, we say that a cheater has “conned” the victim out of his or her money. But a “con man” is different. A con man is someone who, first of all, inspires confidence, which Patterson didn’t. As one witness in Long’s book stated, he came across as the used-car-salesman type. Second, a con-man runs “cons”—schemes that are wholly and knowingly fraudulent. Patterson didn’t do that—his mad inventions, such as his prop lock, were sincerely believed in. And some of them would have worked, even if they didn’t set the world afire.
It may be just as bad morally to be a cheater as a con-man, but that’s not the point. The point is that there is no precedent in Patterson’s behavior for running a con like a Bigfoot hoax. Even if you want to think he was a crook, that wasn’t his
modus operandi.
QUOTE(Heironimus 29)
Rob McConnell: Prior to the film, did Patterson admit openly that he was looking for Sasquatch?
Heironimus: Well, I’ve been told he went to Mt. St. Helens before this, him and Gimlin … and he was supposed to have sighted tracks up towards his place—and those are the only ones that have been seen around. … He was trying to get this across.
Although Yakima is east of the mountains and thus in a mostly low-rainfall, open-country, low-Sasquatch area, there have been continuing Bigfoot events over the years, including track finds, in the large Yakama Indian Reservation immediately southwest of Yakima, which is well wooded.
For instance, in the years between 1972 and 1978, UFO investigator Bill Vogel uncovered 25 such instances. (These were described in Appendix 6 (pp. 144-49) of
Examining the Earthlight Theory: The Yakima UFO Microcosm, 1990, by local author Greg Long.) And this was despite the fact that, as Vogel wrote, “The local Indian people are very reluctant to disclose or talk about them. … So I feel safe in saying that the number of Bigfoot encounters on the Reservation has been many, many times more than just the ones which have come to our attention.”
Heironimus is probably unaware of track-finds in that area because of the Indians’ reticence, and also because the local media hasn’t publicized Bigfoot activity after Patterson passed away. It often takes an active local-area investigator to bring a Bigfoot story to the attention of the press.
QUOTE(Heironimus 30)
Rob McConnell: About the costume: Was it a one-piece, a two-piece? Were the feet separate?
Heironimus: Well, it seems to me like, if I remember, I had to sit down on a log. They pulled the suit on to the waist, then, stiff arms out, they put the torso on, and then the head on last.
But, “About the costume: Was it a one-piece, a two-piece? Were the feet separate?” That question was dodged.
QUOTE(Heironimus 31)
Rob McConnell: What did they do to get the breast effect?
Heironimus: Uh, Roger modified the face and put the breasts on it, and he combed the fur and he took patches off here and there y’know to make it look like it had been in the brush and that kinda stuff. Roger made the face different and he put the breasts on it.
But, “What did they
do to get the breast effect?” That question was dodged.
QUOTE(Heironimus 32)
Rob McConnell: What was Patterson like while he was taking the film? Was he joking around? Did he act as though this was going to be a con?
Heironimus: He was very serious about this. Anybody that would spend all that time modifying the suit, arranging to go down there, his brother-in-law was backing him financially—it was planned out very good.
Therefore it’s all the more absurd that he handed over the suit for transport, and the film for mailing, when there was no reason to do so, and a damn good reason not to: the risk that Heironimus, who hadn’t yet been paid a dime, would reveal it.
QUOTE(Heironimus 33)
Rob McConnell: How much did this entire production cost?
Heironimus: I have no idea. … It couldn’t have been very much, y’know. Like I say, he promised me the thousand dollars and after 35 years I saw this thing on TV on The World’s Greatest Hoaxes and I said, “It’s time people knew the truth about this.”
But his subsequent behavior belies his claim that he was burning with an altruistic desire to
shine light into darkness, as Korff put it. In January 1999 Woodard issued a press release announcing that his client was the man in the Bigfoot suit, and that he would shortly be holding a press conference to describe his role in the affair. And yet that conference was never held, and nothing further was heard from Heironimus for more than five years, until the publication of Long’s book in the spring of 2004. Why was there such a long delay?
Was it because, as I’ve read on the net somewhere, René Dahinden threatened to sue him if he held that conference, and so he waited until he died?
QUOTE(Heironimus 34)
So I talked to a couple of attorney-friends of mine and they said, “Go for it,” so I spilled the beans.
These would have been Woodard and Coffey, presumably. So, if they were friends, he’d have told them his story earlier, not just in the wake of the
World’s Greatest Hoaxes show, right? But in Long’s book, Woodard implied he’d only just met Heironimus and heard his story:
QUOTE
“Bob is a real salt of the earth guy,” Woodard said, quick to reinforce my assessment of his client. He said that Heironimus had only recently contacted him, and so far he didn’t have much information regarding Heironimus’s case. (p. 154)
This inconsistency is suspicious. It could be interpreted as indicating that Woodard was posing as a stranger to Heironimus in order to affect an objective (and thus more convincing) positive assessment of his client’s authenticity.
QUOTE(Heironimus 35)
Rob McConnell: If you had known after 35 years the film would be taken so seriously by so many, would you have done it?
Heironimus: Yes, I would have, and I also would have demanded my money or I would have spilled the beans or told the media a month later.
How about consulting a lawyer first? Didn’t any of the hundred folks who “knew it was me in the suit” make the elementary suggestion that he consult an attorney? They would also have known that he hadn’t been paid, because this was part of what he told Hammermeister, supposedly on the night of his return. If he had, presumably others would have heard that as well, and such a tidbit would have spread far and wide.
Telling a lawyer what had happened would have broken his agreement with Patterson far less than “letting the cat out of the bag” around Yakima. Because what’s said in an attorney-client relationship is confidential, it wouldn’t have amounted to violating the spirit of his agreement with Patterson. Neither Patterson nor his widow would have known if he’d done so. (Long absurdly implied that they
would have known and that this would therefore have undermined his hopes for repayment. See Long’s statement on the Rense interview, a transcript of which is online on the Rense site.)
And it’s suspicious that Heironimus has started being resentful about non-payment
only now. (See pages 336, 339−40, 343, 351−52 & 370 of Long’s book.) Emotions are felt at the time when it is natural to feel them. It’s implausible that Heironimus would have been unfailingly calm and silent about this matter in private (and
in vino) back then (e.g. p. 398 & 406-08), but that he would become outspokenly outraged about it in public now. If he were truly angry about not being paid, the
time for him to have expressed that anger would have been in the 1968−72 period, when the injury was fresh and when it was obvious that Patterson was raking in the dough. And the place for him to have complained was a tavern, where it is traditional for mistreated persons to blubber in their beer.
QUOTE(Heironimus 36)
Question from listener Robin: Since you didn’t get paid, why didn’t you speak up earlier?
Heironimus: I was hoping year after year there that I would get paid. And then, after about four years I decided everybody knew that it was me anyway out where we lived out there. They would say, “Was it really you?” … And I’d say, “Yes, it was.” I just let the cat out of the bag. It didn’t matter to me—I knew after three or four years I wouldn’t be paid anyway.
But, first, that time estimate is inconsistent with his earlier estimates:
QUOTE(Long’s book)
p. 352: It got to a point there after a year and a half of it, that keeping quiet didn’t matter to me.
p. 370: I was supposed to keep my mouth shut. That’s what I was supposed to be paid for. But, you know, after a couple of years, you don’t get any money, things kind of fell out.
Second, it’s absurd for him to say he “kept hoping” and “All I wanted was my thousand bucks” when he’d broken his side of the bargain by blabbing the night of his return, with the result that “Two weeks after the film came out on television, 50 to 100 people in that community out there knew it was me.” How could he possibly have expected an out-of-the-blue check-in-the-mail in those circumstances? His only two options at that point were to threaten Patterson or his widow with telling the media (to get his $1000), or actually telling the media (to get revenge and let the public know the truth).
Third, if he knew after three or four years that he wouldn’t be paid, why was he hoping for decades beyond that point he
would get paid? Why not blab after five years and see justice done—or at least spill the beans to a lawyer?
Heironimus artfully dodged the caller’s question, which wasn’t asking about why he didn’t “let the cat out of the bag”
privately, to persons who approached him in Yakima, but why he didn’t “speak up”
publicly, to the media, back in, say, 1972 (after Patterson’s death), the way he’s done now. Heironimus has no good answer for that.
There are many reasons why a false claimant wouldn’t have spoken up thirty years ago:
• There’d have been no entry with his name in it in the logbook of a Eureka motel.
• There’d have been no indication of a three-day absence from work in his employer’s records.
• There’d have been a good chance that the “real” guy-in-the-suit might have exposed a false claimant to his role.
• There’d have been many fresh memories and living witnesses to his roadside ape-suit hoaxing and barroom suit-displays.
• There’d have been pressure on him to sue DeAtley for his share of the loot, given that the injury was fresh and the statute of limitations on it hadn’t expired. In addition, he was promised not just $1000, but a share of the profits. (p. 343)
Today, it’s unlikely that any incriminating motel or work-attendance records from back then have been retained, or that the “real” Patty-actor will step forward, or that many fellow patrons of the Circle-Inn and members of the Ridge Runners (who witnessed his roadside monkeyshines, according to Merle Warehime) are still among the living. That’s the likely reason Heironimus held his peace until 1999.
QUOTE(Heironimus 37)
Rob McConnell: So after all these years, after all the controversy, after hearing so many so-called experts look at the film and say that you were a Sasquatch—have you ever been nominated for an Oscar?
Heironimus: (laughs)—No, nothing like that, sir.
He should get an Oscar for his performance
now.
QUOTE(Heironimus 38)
Like I say, I went to California, I was on a lie detector show, one of the biggest polygraph testers in the US gave me the test. And of course I passed the other one at the police department in Yakima.
A discussion of the value of lie detector results would be too lengthy to include here. I’ll postpone it until I post Korff’s comments.
QUOTE(Heironimus 39)
Question from listener Jeff: A show like this is worth staying up all night for. Have you received ridicule or threats?
Heironimus: I haven’t received anything, really. There’s a few of those professors so-called that—[trails off] a couple of other guys that called in and said I’m lying.
No, I haven’t had any real threats over it, except for Gimlin, Bob. I still consider Bob a friend. His attorney wrote me a threatening letter.
Rob McConnell: What did the attorney’s letter say?
Heironimus: They told me I’d better confess or clam up on this thing or they would sue me.
Rob McConnell: Confess about what?
Heironimus: Well, I guess they were afraid of the truth. … But the deal is, I’m sure that Bob, which is a friend of mine, he lives about a quarter mile down the road from me, had promised Roger on his deathbed that he would never reveal the hoax.
I told Roger I wouldn’t tell anybody either. But, after seeing this thing on TV for 35 years, as I say, every other month or every three months, for all those years, somebody’s being paid for that film to be shown. I never got a dime. Not one dime. After 35 years I saw The World’s Greatest Hoaxes. I said, “It’s time people knew the truth.”
So why didn’t he send Pat Patterson a four-word postcard, “Pay up or else”? She was approachable by him—they were childhood friends. She supposedly knew the film was a hoax. A postcard couldn’t have done any harm, could it?
QUOTE(Heironimus 40)
Heironimus: One of Roger’s family members called me about four years ago from Colorado and told me that he personally saw one suitcase plumb full of money. And he also saw a garbage can, a 30- or 40-gallon garbage can, full of money.
These were gate receipts from theaters, and would have been loosely packed singles—90% of them—scooped from the till. It’s not as though they were tightly packed wads of twenties.
And they represented gross receipts, not net profit. The expenses Patterson and DeAtley had on the road were considerable. They had to rent a theater or gym, advertise extensively (and expensively) on TV, hire temporary projector operators and ticket-takers, etc. (pp. 263-65) And there were risks and losses, such as after Hansen stated that his Minnesota Iceman was hoax.
QUOTE(Heironimus 41)
Rob McConnell: Kal was just talking about wading boots.
Heironimus: Those were irrigation boots, y’know, kinda like irrigators wear, up to about the knees. That’s why the calves stick out pretty good there.
But this contradicts what Heironimus said in Long’s book:
QUOTE
I … slipped my legs into the legs of the suit, which felt like they were hip boots or wading boots, you know, these long boots that go up to your waist. (p. 344)
If these irrigation boots were used in the Cow Camp recreation, they failed to create calves as shapely as Patty’s. (“Irrigators” would be workers in irrigation channels on farms in eastern Washington, I assume.)
QUOTE(Heironimus 42)
Rob McConnell: Has Gimlin made any money on this film?
Heironimus: He claims he hasn’t made any money, no. And I don’t think he would lie to me about that.
Rob McConnell: Has there been a change in his lifestyle over the years or is he still the same Bob Gimlin that you’ve always known?
Heironimus: He’s basically the same old boy, y’know. He’s retired, he’s got a nice place down there below me, and he’s still breaking horses and does his own thing.
Rob McConnell: Tell me, do you guys meet at the local bar and bend elbows having a good old beer and some chicken wings? Do you ever look at him and say, “Ah come on, why don’t we just come clean?”
Heironimus: No, we don’t talk much about this anymore, in fact we hardly talk at all. We didn’t talk at all for awhile, then we started waving at each other. He stopped me a couple of times, asked how I was doing, that’s about it. We don’t talk about Bigfoot.
QUOTE(Heironimus 43)
Rob McConnell: Now, how do you think people are going to take the fact that Patterson has graduated to the next level of our spiritual development and is no longer with us? How do you think people are going to feel now that this is coming to a head, that it’s going to affect his family, and has anybody said, “Why don’t you just leave sleeping dogs lie?”
Heironimus: No, not really. We expected that, uh—[trails off]. Some of the family didn’t like it at all. But, uh, the truth is the truth. Two or three of the family knew it was me anyway.
Were two of those persons Patterson’s sons? Dave Murphy, who is writing a book on Patterson, told me that he’s learned that they “confessed” that the film was a hoax to avoid beatings from their schoolmates, who insisted they stop lying that it was authentic. They were sure it was a hoax, probably because they’d heard and believed Heironimus’s rumor-mongering. Those sons have since recanted their confessions. A confession given under duress has no standing.
Or would Heironimus disagree? I suspect those “confessions” got to Heironimus and bolstered him in his conviction that he was doing no wrong by claiming the film was a hoax.
And who was the third Patterson family member who supposedly acknowledged the film was a hoax? Bruce Mondor, whom Korff quoted as claiming that, has told me he made no such statement and has no knowledge about the film’s authenticity.
QUOTE(Heironimus 44)
Rob McConnell: I’m getting MSN messages from around the world and from the X-Zone nation and they’re supportive of you and they commend you for coming out and being honest.
(edit)
[Continued]
QUOTE(Gigantofootecus @ Dec 29 2006, 03:57 PM) [snapback]361583[/snapback]
I would estimate that Roger P is holding out the casts approx. 1.5 feet in front of him (front of cast to chest).
I'll assume that Roger P's height was 5'6" (correct me if I'm wrong)
Then his apparent height is underscaled by (66"-58")/66" = 12%
I'm pretty sure Patterson's height was 5'3"--and I suspect he rounded that up. (I could "source" my figure but it might take me an hour to find it. I'm sure some reader here has a citation at his fingertips.)
When my elbows rest against my torso, the way they seem to in the photo, my palms are about 1.05 foot closer to the camera. I'm 11 inches taller. So let's say RP's forearm is 11 inches. (Hmm--but add an inch to allow for the thickness of the cast. That gets a nice even 1-foot extension out from the body.)
I hope those figures would work out properly.
(Also, there's a slight rim of plaster a bit beyond the toes, which enlarges the foot a bit, altho I see from where you've drawn your line that you've corrected for this.)
Postscript to Dodgy Daegling Part 2:
=======================
This article’s three major findings were that:
1. Back widths comparable to Patty’s can be found in one man in 20. A generous guess would be one man in 20,000. The article exaggerates by 100,000%.
2. Obliquities of 10 and 20 degrees change apparent height by 10% and 17% rather than 1.5% & 6%. The article exaggerates by an average of 475%. ((10 / 1.5) + (17 / 6) / 2)
3. An offset of five degrees to the side changes apparent height by 8%, rather than .4%. The article exaggerates by 2000%.
These false findings were not accidents. They were in line with what an unscrupulous partisan set out to “find,” as evidenced by Daegling’s dodgy twisting of the material in the ASB, and by his refusal to own up to his fraud when Meldrum pointed it out. These lies have become widely accepted as authoritative, and are commonly cited.
===========
If Daegling’s article is Good Enough For
Skeptical Inquirer (GEFSI) it would provide (further) evidence that the real principle of the skeptics’ movement is, “Any stick will do to beat the devil,” and that the proper name for its variety of “skepticism” is
scofticism.
QUOTE(Gigantofootecus @ Dec 21 2006, 05:25 PM)
You are right to compensate for foreshortened angles, but they must represent only the component angles along the line of sight. Lengths are foreshortened according to the cosine of these component angles, which must be established relative to the Z plane.
Thanks for the mention of the cosine--I knew there was a shortcut! :laugh: (My shortcut had been to assume 45 degrees and divide by 2--a shade-tree mathematician's trick.)
QUOTE(Gigantofootecus @ Dec 21 2006, 05:25 PM)
That said, I'm pretty sure you can't assume a body angle of 45 degrees for frame 72, nor measure angles directly from the PGF. Instead of reconstructing the trackway and establishing the camera position, I suggest you take 90 digital pics of yourself, from 0 degrees (full back) to 90 degrees (profile). Distance from the camera doesn't matter. With these images you should be able to estimate Patty's body position within a few degrees from the line of sight.
I've stated in the past that Daegling's assertion that Patty's "unknown" angle of travel (assuming the tracks were faked, as he does) is not in fact unknowable (as he argues), because we BFFers, with a little training in angle-estimating on mannequins, and/or with access to a set of online angle-on-the-back photos such as you suggest, could falsify his claim by accurately estimating the angle of any "unknown" photos of Daegling's suited back that he or Schmitt shot and posted.
A simpler and more accurate proposition is needed than shooting a set of angled-comparison-photos a human, because skeptics wouldn't be able to reproduce the results in their lab. Therefore I suggest using a Lazy Susan, pasting a protractor to it, mounting a short (one foot or less), cheap, commercially available human mannequin on it, and advancing it by small increments.
I suggest using increments of two degrees (e.g., 35, 37, etc.), allowing viewers to interpolate any in-between positions as being one of the "even" angles. Also, I suggest shooting only angles within the range of Patty-like angles. I.e., angles above 35 degrees. These simplifications are to avoid overwhelming the website and the viewer.
Mannequins are available for $20 and up ppd. online. I bought one, the Art S. Buck's Artist's Model. It's described and sold online at
http://www.in2art.com/art-supplies/artsbuck-artists-model .
QUOTE
These anatomically proportional, one-sixth scale models have over 30 points of articulation, allowing them to display nearly the full range of human movement. The neutral gray color of the durable plastic will not distract the eye when sketching. ... Display stand [so it'll stand upright] is included.
I'd gladly lend mine (still in its box) to any long-term BFFer (hopefully GF) who'd take and post a set of photos I'm advocating--as long as he'll let me or anyone include the images in writings about BF, such as in future installments of my Dodgy Daegling series. Just PM me your address.
(Hmm -- for "round two" we (i.e., you) will have to construct a little Bigfoot suit for the mannequin, to satisfy Daegling's objection that a hairy coating masks angles and joints.) Does anyone here have seamstress skills? I've got a large swatch (five by three feet) of fake gorilla fur she can have. Easier would be to paint the mannequin with liquid latex (the joints would have to be protected by a covering of grease, to allow flexibility) and then scatter flocking or some other fuzz over it before it sets, to blur its outline.
QUOTE(Gigantofootecus @ Dec 21 2006, 05:25 PM)
If you also mounted an overhead camera perpendicular to the line of sight, (and included some leg bends) you could get a good estimate of most of the component angles of Patty's body parts as well.
This is why my mannequin is neat--it can be bent every which way, enabling these overhead photos to be taken.
In round three a modified mannequin with Patty's proportions would be used, after some BFer skilled in craftsmanship (i.e., not me) did the work.
This Furry Mannequin Project (FMP) sounds silly or tangential, but actually it is an example of (shade-tree)
Science in Action, and could be a historic advance in PGF analysis. This mannequin and what it demonstrates could be featured on TV shows like LMS II, at conferences, etc. (The whole thing could even be digitzed so it could be rotated and bent in software for cyber-world analysis, letting the software do most of the work.)
We could also end out this mannequin to skeptics or curious photo-analysts, etc. for them to do their own studies on. Just so I don't have to get involved in dealing with them, I'd hand over custody of the mannequin, in its costume, to some "name" BFer whom such skeptics could contact. (E.g., Noll or Murphy or Perez or Meldrum. Or GF, if he's the one who's invested time in the matter by taking the photos. He would be my first choice.)
QUOTE(Gigantofootecus @ Dec 21 2006, 05:25 PM)
This is the first step. The next step you've done, which is to add up the vector lengths and apply corrections to the foreshortened vectors.
This is what, I presume, professional photogrammatists do, and what aerial reconnaissance analysts did during the war. It's not accurate to the last decimal point--and probably not even to the first. But it'll provide a reasonable "ballpark" or "range." (I.e., within a couple of inches, at the 95% level of certainty.) That in turn will make other computations, such as shoulder breadth and speed, more reliable. (And, having those, good distance estimates could be obtained. And then by re-iterating the process, maybe the figures could be refined to obtain a best fit.) It's too bad this wasn't done--or at least that the procedure was not spelled out--in the NASI report. Daegling's hi-falutin' conflation of unknown with unknowable is true only in the impractical domain of theoretical skepticism, where only last-decimal-point accuracy passes the bar. In real-world terms it's ridiculous.
QUOTE(Gigantofootecus @ Dec 21 2006, 05:25 PM)
It looks like you've estimated in the ballpark. By +/- 1" I'm not so sure. In the end you must also add 1 to 2% to account for the foot being closer to the camera than the body. This depends on how far Patty is from the camera in frame 72. Here's a few other foot frames (288+) to get an average. Note how different Patty's body orientation is from frame 72.
Here are some rough estimates. If Patty is 100 feet away in clear-foot frame 61 (on p. 52 of Murphy's
Meet the Sasquatch), and if her shank is 1.5 feet long, and if she's turned at a 45-degree angle from the line of sight, that would make her foot look .75% larger than it should be. (Based on Daegling's estimates in "Bigfoot's Screen Test," where the % of expansion roughly matches the % closer to the camera.) Therefore, add 1% (for simplicity) to her height. (So saith this shade-tree trigonometrician.)
One thing that must be kept in mind is that the sole-length-to-foot-length ratio in any PGF frame must also be corrected to match the proportions of the cast from the site (shown on the reverse side of the fifth color-plate page in Meldrum's book). The toe-tips in the PGF frame 61 are masked by shadow and/or foreshortened, probably because they angle upwards a bit. (This can be seen at another point in her gait, just before touchdown, where her toes splay not only outwards but upwards.) The photo of the foot in frame 61 obviously doesn't show all of the toes, because in it the second toe is longer than the big toe, unlike the cast. (Measurement of the sole-ratio confirms this incorrectitude.)
This makes the foot in the PGF appear 7% shorter than it really is. When the foot is lengthened by 7%, Patty's walking height shrinks correspondingly, from 6'5" to SG's 5'9" or so. (Knocking out Heironimus :laugh: )
I should have posted the full D&S quote:
QUOTE(Daegling & Schmitt @ "Bigfoot's Screen Test")
One of us (Daegling) was filmed at a distance of 490 cm from the camera. Three sources of calibration were used: a two-meter standard, Daegling's foot length, and his heel width. These standards were digitized on the image(7) and used to estimate Daegling's true height (194.5 cm). As expected, the two-meter standard yielded a very good estimate of stature (193.6 cm).
…
Using Daegling's foot length as a standard, the error increases markedly (204.3 cm or 3 percent above the true value). Using a heel-width calibration standard the error balloons to 28 percent (249.4 cm, with pronounced inter-observer error [sd = 6.5]). These figures make no allowance for camera obliquity or objects off the intended reference plane. If either of these factors are [sic] introduced, errors will increase.
What D&S's panel of estimators was doing was measuring two objects in a photo with a ruler. From these two measurements of photographic images (not the things themselves), a ratio was obtained. This could have been done by either D&S or by the estimators themselves.
From this ratio, D&S, knowing the actual length of one of the items in the photo (the "standard"), derived the length of the other item (the "subject"). Here's how it would have worked with the measurement of Daegling's height, in the quote above:
Let's say (for simplicity) that the measurers got 100 mm when they measured the image of the 200 cm standard alongside him. Then they got 96.8 mm (a tad low) when they (mis)-measured the 194.5 cm image of Daegling.
To obtain the ratio of Daegling relative to the Standard they (or D&S) computed: 96.8 / 100.0 = 0.968. In other words, his height was 96.8% of the standard’s height.
To derive the height of Daegling, D&S computed: .968 * 200 cm = 193.6 cm. His actual height was 194.5 cm, so the estimate was off by .9 cm, or about half a percentage point, which is “very good.”
Similar accuracy could be obtained by estimating the ratio of the height of a window’s shutter to its width, from a photo. If the height is three times the width, a photo-estimation will reveal that accurately. Further, if the height is known to be three feet, then the width can be derived from it by multiplying it by the ratio (33.3%). There’s no need in principle to stand the shutter up against a wall and measure it with a ruler before we can say we’ve accurately estimated its width.
If direct measurement, rather than derived measurement, were required for accuracy, then surveying (and map-making) would be impossible. (E.g., distances are derived using trig and geometry.)
Error would creep in if the shutter had been swung open by some unknown amount (“obliquity”) or if the height of one window and the width of another window, 10% further away, were being compared (“object off the intended reference plane”). The latter situation is what’s happening with your chessboards—they’re off the reference plane.
In other words, if we knew Patty’s height, we could accurately derive her shoulder width. (Within 2%, say, because it’s midway between the length of the Standard (1% error) and the length of the foot (3% error) in D&S’s article.) (After deducting an estimated inch for hair, as Krantz did.) And we
could know Patty’s height if there were an item of known length in the photo with her.
And there
is such a yardstick—her foot. (But before employing it, it must be scaled to its proper length by adding a correction factor for her toes’ upward slant, so that the toes constitute the same percentage of the foot’s length in the photo that they do in the cast.)
(Obliquity is no real problem because we can take the maximum value in each step sequence; because it is sometimes obvious from the angle of the shank when it is horizontal (and the foot vertical); and because we can take an average length from several step sequences.)
Well, obviously, with these corrections (hair, toes, obliquity-averaging) being made, the result is going to have a certain margin of error—say 5%. But that’s good enough for this sort of work. Re-enactors can choose the minimum value.
===================
Unfortunately, there was (I suspect) a desire in the past to give Patty a heavy weight, to account for the depth of the footprints. And this in turn (I suspect) led to a desire to give her a tall height. It wasn’t realized until the recent Noll enhancements and Davis observations how very flexible the foot is. Such a flexible (and powerful) foot would (I suspect) dig deeply into a sand-and-gravel bar’s compliant substrate as it “gripped” it, creating much deeper prints than a rigid foot (such as a horse’s or shod-human’s) would. Tube’s experiments with flexible feet in sand tend to confirm this.
Say—is this what happens when an ape walks across a firm “bar”? I.e., do its prints dig in deeply?
QUOTE(RayG @ Dec 9 2006, 02:12 PM) [snapback]358294[/snapback]
I hope I've shown that making accurate claims of shoulder-width from a photo of Patty is extremely difficult at best, and downright impossible at worst.
Absolutely not. First, the image of Patty someone recently posted and you re-posted is not the full-on back shot I had in mind. The red line does seem to be drawn beyond the edge of one of her shoulders.
But there is also a full-on back shot posted here a few years ago, the one Green created his diagram/sketch from. (Most likely I also printed it out in my files, and could track it down on the site. But right now I'm too busy and/or lazy to look for it.) Anyway, I trust that Green and Krantz, using it, made an accurate estimate of the ratio of the creature's shoulder-width to its height--36%. (BTW, they corrected for Patty’s slump, bend knees, and sunken soles by adding about 8% to her apparent, or walking, height to obtain her standing height, which gave them a lower ratio than they would have otherwise.)
Second, your chessboard photo does nothing to discredit their estimate, for 2 reasons:
1. They were comparing items that were at the same distance from the camera. But your chessboards are a foot further away than your shoulders. Because the shoulders were only four feet (I estimate) from the lens, this makes the chessboards 20% further away. Your shoulders therefore "cover" more of them than they should. I think this is what's called "forced perspective." It's like putting your thumb so close to your eye that it's bigger than the moon, or holding a fish out in front of you and taking a picture from close up, to exaggerate its size.
An accurate comparison would require that the chessboards be
alongside the back of your shoulders--and also that the camera be at least 15 feet back, to minimize parallax. Try it and see what happens.
2. They were comparing two of the creature's body dimensions to each other: shoulder-width to height. Your photo shows only the first of those. That's because you were doing something quite different--and something I've pointed out to you before as being irrelevant. You were attempting to obtain a measurement of one part of a body, and then use that to measure some other part. This introduces room for error, and anyway is irrelevant because it doesn't replicate the procedure you're criticizing: the direct comparison of one body part to another, to obtain a ratio.
You're hung up on this absolute-measurement business. We don't need an absolute value, only a relative value. It doesn't matter if Patty is five feet tall or eight feet tall (or what width those heights would imply for her shoulders). An absolute height number can't be reliably obtained anyway. And even if it could be, 33% of the disputants wouldn't agree that it
was reliable. What matters is the width of her shoulders in relation to her height.
The absolute values (inches) you obtained are therefore irrelevant. Green and Krantz
derived their shoulder width measurements from an estimated height of Patty that was too high, IMO. This in turn led to excessive width estimates for her shoulders. But that's a side-issue.
However, now that you’ve brought it up, here are the numbers I obtain from a short, six-foot (standing) height estimate for Patty.
Heironimus (72”, with a 27% shoulder-width-to-height %):
72 * .36 = 25.92
72 * .27 = 19.44
25.92 - 19.44 = 6.48
6.48 / 2 = 3.24” extra width needed per shoulder.
RayG (72” assumed, with a 30% shoulder-width-to-height %):
72 * .36 = 25.92
72 * .30 = 21.6
25.92 - 21.6 = 4.32
4.32 / 2 = 2.16” extra width needed per shoulder.
Hmm … not as much padding would be needed as I thought! Well, I’m glad I found this out now, in this informal arena, before I made a formal claim. (And I’m glad that, in previous posts, I’ve claimed only that BH would need “well over three inches greater width per shoulder.” I didn’t go far out on a limb, so I don’t have to back down very much. Just half an inch.)
QUOTE(Skeptical Greg @ Dec 5 2006, 03:16 PM) [snapback]357568[/snapback]
What was the source for the Patty sketch ? ( which copy of the film ) ... It's not nice to draw your own sketch of Patty ( without citing a source ) and claim it provides empirical data ..
It's the Green diagram that others were referring to above. I don't of course know which film-copies HE got it from. (He did have possession of the original for over a month). It appeared, as LAL noted, in Krantz on 105. It also appeared in Green on 445, and
Meet the Sasquatch on 65. I assumed everyone was familiar with it, especially since I'd "sourced it" a couple of days earlier in my post in the Daegling's Errments thread. You even responded in that thread with this, so you should have been aware of it:
QUOTE(Skeptical Greg @ Dec 5 2006, 07:31 PM) [snapback]357613[/snapback]
QUOTE(RogerKni)
Based on John Green's diagram on p. 445 of his book Sasquatch: the Apes Among Us, Patty's bideltoid breadth (34") is 55% wider than the 22" breadth of her back. (This percentage would hold even if his inch-measurement estimates were wrong.)
It's meaningless unless you can show that we are really looking at deltoids and a back .. ( not a suit with shoulder pads underneath )
As for whether his diagram provides “empirical data,” I didn’t explicitly make that claim, although I implicitly treated it as authoritative. But I can’t pepper every post I write with qualifications like that—this is an informal arena. I’m more careful in my “articles.”
I believe Green’s diagram needs to be adjusted a bit. The foot shown is too small, and the legs are a bit too short, I think. (The IMI it yields is .91, which is a bit too high.) But it’s still good enough for most Bigfoot work. E.g., the shoulder-breadth-to-back-breadth ratio isn’t off by more than a tiny bit, I wouldn’t think, because he had a flat-on back-view to work with.
Anyway, I’ve taken care of that problem (“offness”) by (often) understating things, where there is doubt. For instance, I claim only that Patty’s shoulders are 35% of her height, although a good case could be made that they’re 36.5% (a figure LAL I think cited above). And I claim only that each of Patty’s shoulders exceeds BH’s by “well over three inches,” which is the most conservative estimate I’ve seen a Bigfooter make. (That’s wide enough that football pads would reveal their presence in motion.)
I haven’t ventured yet to criticize the diagram, because I’m at almost the zero-level with regard to image manipulating on my PC, and I’m not an expert at measuring this sort of thing, and I’ve got too many other things to worry about. I suggest that some other Bigfooter create a more modern and correct version, based on findings of the LMS team, Glickman, etc., etc.
========================
QUOTE(Skeptical Greg @ Dec 5 2006, 03:16 PM) [snapback]357568[/snapback]
How do we know that any film/video /stills we see of Patty are proportionally correct ?
That's a gigantic can of worms, and would require expert articles by photogrammatists to really nail down. And it would also turn on just how exact you want "correct" to be. (Correct to the last decimal point? Of course not.) I've responded on an amateur level at length on this in posts from long ago, but I only did half a job.
I know Daegling claimed that, because he found in "Bigfoot's Screen Test" that reliable
measurements can't be obtained from the PGF, therefore body
proportions can't be obtained either. But that's a
non sequitur. I'll deal at length with this claim of his in future installments of my Dodgy Daegling series. For now, anything Daegling says regarding the PGF should be considered as more likely to be false than true, based my exposure of his unconscionable bias, incompetence, and mendacity in my recent installments of Dodgy Daegling 1 & 2 in the "Daegling's Errments" thread.
QUOTE(Skeptical Greg @ Dec 5 2006, 07:31 PM) [snapback]357613[/snapback]
QUOTE
Based on John Green's diagram on p. 445 of his book Sasquatch: the Apes Among Us, Patty's bideltoid breadth (34") is 55% wider than the 22" breadth of her back. (This percentage would hold even if his inch-measurement estimates were wrong.)
It's meaningless unless you can show that we are really looking at deltoids and a back .. ( not a suit with shoulder pads underneath )
If the assumption is that we are looking at an animal , why do all the measurements and proportions matter ? They are what they are.
Oh, I wasn't trying to prove anything with that observation. It was just something I mentioned in passing, because I figured readers would be curious about it, given that I'd just mentioned the percentage (42%) for the German AF group Daegling had employed, and because I'd included Patty in the image alongside the human figures from the
ASB.This 55% figure is one of the points re-creators need to match. There's nothing difficult about it. (Unless they intend to make their creature swing its arms widely while half-turning, and still pass the giggle test.)
Dodgy Daegling—Part 2
Roger KnightsLet’s play
What If? Let’s say that it’s the summer of 1999 and you are Benjamin Radford, hardheaded Bigfoot skeptic and managing editor of the
Skeptical Inquirer. You are basking in having Bashed The Believers, once again, with Daegling & Schmitt’s “Bigfoot’s Screen Test.” It contained the following passages. [My boldfacing.]
QUOTE
We estimated a human subject's stature from videotape recordings using calibration objects of known dimension as scalars under ideal laboratory conditions. …
These standards were digitized [and pasted] on[to] the image [of Daegling] and used to estimate Daegling's true height (194.5 cm) [6′ 4″].
………………
These figures make no allowance for camera obliquity or objects off the intended reference plane. If either of these factors are [sic] introduced, errors will increase. For example,
when foot length is offset from the reference plane by 10 degrees but the length of the foot is considered to be the same as before, stature estimates are off by about 10 percent (214.9 cm). At a 20-degree offset, the overestimate is about 17 percent (227.7 cm). The degree to which the foot is out of plane cannot be reliably assessed from an image ….
………………
When we rotated the camera 5 degrees off an intended reference plane (Figure 3), a calibration standard of 176 cm failed to predict Schmitt's stature of 188 cm with acceptable accuracy, even though scalar and subject were “coplanar.”
The apparent stature was 172 cm, fully 8 percent smaller than true stature. —David Daegling & Daniel Schmitt, “Bigfoot’s Screen Test,” Skeptical Inquirer, May/June 1999, pp. 22 & 23
To eliminate any of our own bias in assessing calibration errors, we used a “blind” measurement protocol.
Five individuals, who were not informed of study objectives, were asked to measure calibration standards. ….
—Ibid., ftn. 7
accompanied by a request to forward it to Daegling:
QUOTE
My dear Daegling,
Hail Satan! Thumbs up on your recent article; I hope it will be incorporated in a book of a similar character.
But, here’s Problem 1: your foot-obliquity numbers conflict with trigonometry, according to which obliquities of 10 and 20 degrees produce much smaller apparent-length shrinkages: only 1.5% and 6.0%, not your 10% & 17%.
A reader may sense that something’s wrong, based on his everyday experience of, for instance, walking past doorways in a hallway and noticing how little their apparent-width grows as he comes nearly abeam of them.
He could confirm this impression by aligning the pivot-point of a protractor with the edge of a sheet of paper, making marks on the paper at the markings for 0°, 10°, 20° & 30°, and measuring how much the height of the marks above the edge of the page shrinks from one height-mark to the next. E.g., if the height of 0 is 62.25 mm, the height of the 10° mark is only1.5% less (61.5 mm), and the height of the 20° mark is only 6% less (58.5 mm).
Here’s what might have happened: You positioned your standards (three rulers, let’s say) against the rung of a chair, one standing straight and two leaning tops-forward at 10° and 20°. You then photographed them, but you did so looking down at an angle from above, not along the floor. This added angle would have increased their obliquity relative to the camera’s reference plane and produced the figures you reported.
Here’s the math that obtains figures close to yours under this scenario: Suppose you used a tripod-mounted camera set at a height of 54″ (5′ 6″) and positioned it at your stated distance from the rulers, 193″ (490 cm). Then:
• The vertical ruler would appear to be shorter than it’s actual height by 3.70%. (3% is what your estimators mismeasured it by.)
• The 10° ruler would appear to be 9.84% shorter. (10% is what your estimators found. 1.5% was the right answer.)
• The 20° ruler would appear to be 18.72% shorter. (17% is what your estimators found. 6% was the right answer.)
Or perhaps you obtained your erroneous results by some different method. Regardless, Someone Has Blundered—you.
And, here’s Problem 2: your Standard-5°-off-the-reference-plane figure also conflicts with trig, according which a 5° offset (60 cm) at the distance given—2438 cm (80 feet)—would shift the Standard only 9.3 cm further away from the camera, and thus produce a shrinkage of only .40%—smaller than your 8% by a factor of 20. (!)
Here’s what must have happened: Your panel of measurers wasn’t instructed to use the 176 cm Standard as a “ruler” to measure the 188 cm Subject, but rather to compare the “ruler” to the Subject! Under that scenario, here’s the math they’d have used to get 8%:
• The Standard is 6.38% shorter than the Subject.
• It will appear an additional .40% shorter due to its being offset.
• Rounding up their result (which I assume they were told to do, or you did for them), produces 7%.
• Add to that your baseline measurement error (rounded up) of 1%,
Voilà !
Or perhaps you obtained your erroneous results by some different method. Regardless, you should have noticed at the time that their results screamed ERROR! and corrected your directions. (A scientist would have done that. He would have been suspicious.) Someone Has Blundered—you.
What to do now? You’ve blown past the too-good-to-be-true warning light and published your mistake, so you’re in an awkward spot, You might admit “I was wrong”—IF you considered it your duty as a dedicated truth-seeker to print the facts and let the chips fall where they may. Starry-eyed Shermer believes such egoless ’fessing-up is characteristic of scientists. His enchanting illusion serves Our Cause well.
But actually confessing would undermine the credibility and persuasiveness of your other findings and arguments. How seriously would Newton have been taken if his Principia had included an errata slip reading, “For ‘earth’ read ‘moon’ and vice versa”? He’d have looked a perfect fool.
Worse, admission of such a grievous error would lower the credibility of the Skeptical Inquirer and even of Scofticism Itself. SI might even become a laughingstock for awhile. Here Below that is equivalent to lèse majesté, or what Shermer might call “a real no-no.” I trust you take my point :new_aaevil: . You surely know how important a movement’s prestige-factor is in “selling” its point of view.
Instead, drop all references to obliquity, letting the topic vanish down the memory hole. It’s doubtful any Bigfooters will notice the omission, they mostly being impressionistic rather than analytical types. Those who do notice will be thankful rather than suspicious.
You should also camouflage what went wrong with your 5°-reference-plane-offset figures. I suggest you concede only a small error and blame it on your measurement panel.
As for the letters that SI’s trigonometrically acute readers will send in, Brother Radford will see to it that they are kept between you, me, and the deep blue sea—i.e., left unpublished. He can fob off such correspondents with a promise that a correction will be made in your forthcoming book. Who will be the wiser for such dodges and deletions, unless he be one so fiendish as ourselves? And all persons are in Our Camp, and won’t make a fuss.
But enough of this negativity. On the positive side:
• The mud you’ve thrown will stick: anti-PGFers will continue to cite your article’s findings on obliquity as authoritative.
• Your statement that “The degree to which the foot is out of plane cannot be reliably assessed from an image ….” was a good misdirection. No one will stop to realize that, because Patty’s lower leg rises in several frames to the horizontal during each step-sequence, there will be one frame in each that shows her sole in the reference plane: i.e., the frame in which the sole is longest.
• Your not defining technical terms and your omission of a glossary a copy of the photo your evaluators used will discourage attempts to analyze your paper, as will your confusing reference to the same thing with different terms, such as “calibration standard,” “reference standard,” “standard,” and “scalar.”
Carry on!
Your affectionate uncle,
Screwtape
[Screwtape was an instructor-devil advising trainee-devils in C.S. Lewis's book,
The Screwtape Letters]
Lo and behold: With regard to Problem 1: In discussing his “first test,” (
Bigfoot Exposed, pp. 134–35), Daegling omitted all reference to obliquity testing, despite its being one of the high points of his
SI article. (That was because it seemingly discredited Bigfooters’ attempts to use Patty’s foot as a yardstick.) Instead, he discussed only the way measurement errors increase as the “standard” used becomes smaller, a relatively minor matter.
With regard to Problem 2: Shamelessly, Daegling continued to endorse his article’s original result, writing, “We looked at what a rotation of the lens by a
mere 5 degrees would do to a set of objects 80 feet from the camera. In the case our volunteers analyzed, the calibration standard missed the true dimension of the unknown by 8%” (p. 138). (His use of “mere” indicates his intention: to continue to push the idea that slight obliquities can cause large distortions, although he knew by then that it wasn’t so (from reader feedback).)
Compounding his sin, he added, “Theoretically, this error [8%] should be smaller [.4%], but this was our average empirical error (as measured by our volunteers)” (p. 154, note 95). An innocent reader would get the impression from Daegling’s calm tone that the theoretical figure was only slightly “off,” that he was being super-conscientious and aboveboard in mentioning the discrepancy at all, and that it was really all the fault of his feckless volunteers.
But if he’d
really been conscientious, rather than only desirous of
seeming so, he’d have stated what that theoretical figure was (.40%). That was something he didn’t dare do, because his readers would have realized that only a small portion of such a great error could be blamed on his volunteers. Daegling was “off” by a factor of 20. Hardly something to crow about, so it’s not surprising that he didn’t.
*****
Indictment: Slimy Scoftic Subterfuge with an oak leaf cluster.
Defense: The writing in D & S’s article is clumsy enough that they might have inadvertently created misleadingly written directions.
Verdict: Two horns, two hooves, and a tail. (If he had submitted a student paper with such blunders—and worse—it would have come back with a large, red F—and an appointment with the dean.)
Sentence: Daegling must to submit his lab data for review by a neutral party. (I nominate Michael Dennett.) If the material he gave to his panel of evaluators—i.e., the photos and the instructions—is found to be faulty, Daegling must submit a corrected article to
SI and disclaim the specific “findings” in the original that are no longer operative.
Bailiff, stop that man: You won’t go broke betting that Dodgy Daegling will do no such thing. He’s not big enough to be small.
How about SI? Can
it put first things first? I.e., will it request Daegling to correct his mistakes (or correct them for him)? Or will it, as it has so far, view an admission of such ghastly errors in one of its most cited articles as a “black eye” that would be too painful to be endured, and continue its coverup? That might work in the short run, but make things worse in the long-term.
“Once to every man and nation / Comes the moment to decide.”
Dodgy Daegling, Part 1
Roger Knights(Note: to keep things simple, I’ve used only inches in what follows, converting Krantz’s and Daegling’s occasional use of metric values where necessary.)
QUOTE
“A man standing six and a half feet tall could wear a bulky suit …. But … the inside edges of his upper arms must then be at least 18.3 inches apart [to match Patty’s chest width]. At 75 inches tall [6´ 3″], my own chest width at that level is only 13.6 inches. I can confidently state that no man of that stature is built that broadly.”
—Grover Krantz, Bigfoot Sasquatch Evidence, pp. 117−18
Commenting on this, David Daegling wrote in his 2004 book,
Bigfoot Exposed, pp. 124−25 (boldfacing mine):
QUOTE
“I decided … that I would verify this claim. … I spent a few minutes in the stacks tracking down the Anthropometry [sic] Source Book [ASB], a thick book [three volumes, actually] containing a comprehensive assortment of measurements of the human body from a number of populations. I found statistics on height and a measurement called the “interscye,” which is an armpit-to-armpit measurement and gives you an idea of how wide a [sic] individual’s chest is. Conveniently, this measurement is taken across the back, in the same way that Krantz was compelled to measure on the film since the subject was heading away from the camera. For this variable, I had before me a set of data on over one thousand individuals, not a very big sample … but big enough to establish how bizarrely Patty was shaped. I was astonished in poring over the tables. … that Krantz, who was a respected scientist at a major research university, could have been so sloppy in making such a bold claim. If no human existed of the dimensions Krantz gives, then about 5% of members of the German Air Force were in need of zoological reclassification. … The numbers were clear: if that was a Sasquatch, then it had the body proportions that can be found in people walking around today. I left the library considerably annoyed and I became deeply skeptical of the remainder of Krantz’s argument.”
Daegling had specified “the numbers” in his earlier article, “Bigfoot’s Screen Test,”
Skeptical Inquirer, May/June 1999:
QUOTE
“In a sample of 1004 men in the German Air Force, interscye of the ninety-fifth percentile is 19.5″, a good 1.2″ larger than Bigfoot’s impossibly wide thorax.”
But, there’s a problem. The
ASB says that the breadth across the shoulders (the “bideltoid breadth,” which is measured to the outer edges of the arms about two inches above the level of the interscye) for the same German Air Force group is 19.8", only 2% wider than the interscye, which Daegling calls a “chest width” measurement (p. 152, n. 74). This would make each arm just 1/7″ thick: (19.8 – 19.5) / 2 = .15″.
Furthermore, the
ASB says that the “chest breadth” (measured in front) for the same group is only13.9″, 40% narrower than Daegling’s “chest width” measurement. But it’s impossible for the front of the chest (13.9″) to be 5.6″ narrower than the back (19.5″).
To touch base with reality, glance at the three human figures below, taken from the
ASB, (vol. 1, ch. III). The shoulder-width (bideltoid breadth) on the rightmost figure is about 42% wider than the width of the chest in front (not Daegling’s mere 2%), and the front and back chests are only slightly different (not Daegling’s 40%). (I think the leftmost human figure was drawn from a slightly thinner individual than the others or they’d be exactly equal.)
Reduced: 64% of original size [ 800 x 441 ] - Click to view full image
Based on John Green’s diagram on p. 445 of his book
Sasquatch: the Apes Among Us, Patty’s bideltoid breadth (34″) is 55% wider than the 22″ breadth of her back. (This percentage would hold even if his inch-measurement estimates were wrong.)
Since Daegling’s measurement implies such absurdities, he must have made an error or two. Here they are. The first is an elementary blunder: circumferential and scalar measurements are incommensurate. The interscye is a circumferential measurement, taken with a tape that follows the curve of the back. (See
ASB, vol. 2, p. 50.) The bideltoid and chest breadth measurements (including the one that Krantz took) are scalar measurements, taken on-the-flat with either a calipers (on a body) or a ruler (on a photo or drawing). Depending on the sharpness of the arc, a circumferential measurement can give a substantially larger figure than a scalar measurement. It's odd that a detail like this escaped Daegling’s notice, he being a specialist in pointing out how measurements can get thrown off when the subject is out-of-square.
Second, the interscye is an unreliable measurement:
QUOTE
“Comparison of all the statistics for a single dimension will provide some clues as to the likely reliability of the measurement techniques. The wide range of mean values for interscye, maximum [with arms stretched forward], for example would suggest—and correctly so—that this measurement [and likewise plain old interscye—RK] is quite sensitive to small differences in measurement technique and subject position.” (ASB, vol. 1, p. IX–54)
Had Daegling consulted anyone knowledgeable in anthropometry (a subdivision of his own field of anthropology) before he popped off, he could have “taken correction” and fixed his errors. But Daegling was uninterested in correcting an error, if the error allowed him to
bash a believer. (Which is a scoftic’s Basic Instinct.) When Jeff Meldrum criticized him, this is how he responded:
QUOTE
“Jeff Meldrum e-mailed Schmitt and me (January 29, 2004) [prior to publication of Daegling’s book] to alert us that he was publishing a rebuttal to our argument. He provided us with text to review [presumably that found in his book, Sasquatch: Legend Meets Science, pp. 163−64] and suggested that we consider recanting our statements. After cordial but frank exchanges among the three of us, we thanked Meldrum for the courtesy but declined to renounce our findings. Meldrum charged us with poor scholarship and careless research, including charges that the interscye dimension was incomparable to Krantz’s measurements of the film because it is normally measured with a tape measure rather than a rigid ruler (Meldrum preferred a measure taken across the front of the chest, while Krantz measured this width across the back).” (p. 154, ftn. 98)
The implication of that passage was that Meldrum was an overwrought fussbudget making a pother over inconsequential details. (I.e., tape vs. ruler: Who cares?—they give the same result.) A second implication was that Meldrum was unscientifically trying to compare apples and oranges (chest-front and chest-back) in order to unfairly bolster his case. A third implication, built upon the first two and conveyed with arch academic understatement, was that Daegling & Schmitt had handled this Blathering Believer in an urbane, grown-up fashion: “After cordial but frank exchanges … we … declined to renounce our findings.”
It was deftly done—but, as Diogenes said, “The better, the worse.” Daegling lied by omission by failing to include Meldrum’s key point: that the interscye is incommensurate because it measures distance along an arc. By implying that the controversy was much ado about nothing—i.e., whether or not a tape measure was the “normal” tool for the job—he artfully conveyed a false impression.
Similarly, he lied by omission by omitting Meldrum’s observation about the great disparity between the
ASB’s (on-the-flat) chest-breadth measurement and its (circumferential) interscye. (This disparity meant that the interscye was a mismeasure of back breadth, because the chest’s breadth actually differs little between front and back.) Daegling implied that Meldrum merely “preferred” a frontal measurement; i.e., that this was a mere eccentricity of his, lacking any objective justification.
Let’s revisit Daegling’s opening statement with what we’ve learned in mind.
Here’s another instance of his lying by omission:
QUOTE
“For this variable, I had before me a set of data on over one thousand individuals, not a very big sample ….” (p. 125)
But he
also had before him
23 other sets of data on 169,966 individuals. (See
ASB, vol. 2, pp. 269−71.) All but one of the 23 had more participants than the 1,004 in the German AF survey. And all had lower interscye numbers than the German AF group’s 19.5″, which was a distinct “outlier,” being well above the nearest group’s 18.2″, and 17% wider than the average group’s 16.6″.
Again:
QUOTE
“I was astonished in poring over the tables. … I was dumbfounded that Krantz, who was a respected scientist at a major research university [Western Washington State?], could have been so sloppy [oh boy] in making such a bold claim. (p. 125)
“His [Krantz’s] confident statement is admirable for its faith but not its veracity.” (“Bigfoot’s Screen Test”)
How would you like your crow today, Dr. Daegling, boiled or fried? (“May your words be soft and sweet, for you may have to eat them.”)
Onward and Oopsward:
QUOTE
“I left the library considerably annoyed and I became deeply skeptical of the remainder of Krantz’s argument.” (p. 125)
So how much cred should the remainder of your argument be given, Dr. D?
Nevertheless, he disingenuously posed as a model of scientific rectitude by adopting an above-the-battle stance, calm tone, and factual focus. This pose, and his lying-by-omission, has fooled some of the people—primarily those who wish to believe his denialism: fellow scoftics. E.g., editor Radford of the
Scoftical Inquirer (Nov. / Dec. 2005) thinks it’s just the stuff to give the troops. This gets my goat.
Indictment: 1. Daegling chose an incommensurate measurement (a measurement on the curve, not on the flat) and mischaracterized it as appropriate (because it was on the back). (He compared apples and oranges.)
2. He selected an unrepresentative survey out of the 23 available—the second-smallest one, and the only one whose result was an outlier. (Exactly what the textbooks tell scientists
not to do—at least without providing an explanation. If he had
intentionally chosen an outlier to show how
extreme a human group could be, and had not intended to mislead, he should have said so plainly. (But if he had exposed his figure’s outlandishness his readers would have been doubtful of it—so he kept mum.))
3. He artfully gave his readers the false impression this was the
only survey.
4. He chose this skewed survey
because its result suited his polemical purpose. (He cherry-picked his evidence. Or, to put it another way, “He stuck in his thumb / And pulled out a plum.”
5. Having pulled out his “plum,” he said, “What a good boy I am.” (He preened himself for his probity and precision in contrast to Krantz.)
6. He didn’t review his result either in his mind’s eye or with a knowledgeable colleague, despite its obvious outlandishness. (He was headstrong.)
7. He refused to correct his mistakes when they were pointed out. (He wouldn’t be humble and objective and admit “I was wrong,” in the scientific spirit.)
8. He minimized and mischaracterized the critique by omission. (He engaged in bad-faith argumentation to mislead readers.)
Verdict: Two thumbs down—way down. (The justification was worse than the crime—which was plenty bad on its own.)
==========================
PS--It's too bad the posts above got messed up during a system upgrade. I hope a global search and replace (for curly quotes and curly apostrophes and such) can be performed. Hundreds of such posts were affected.)
Should prove to be interesting. Only one thing-if you as Bigfoot researchers call in, please be respectful and professional.
