21 Degrees of Separation
Posted by: Craig Woolheater on November 10th, 2012
Cryptomundian HeIsReal brought this video to our attention in the comments section of this post: Philip Morris Debunks Bigfoot!
21 degrees between Bigfoot and you
Here we explore the difference between our walk and whomever or whatever it was walking in the Patterson Bigfoot Film.Uploaded by ThinkerThunker on Feb 23, 2012
I wonder if Bill Munns has looked at this?
What do the Cryptomundians think?
Co-founder of Cryptomundo in 2005.
I have appeared in or contributed to the following TV programs, documentaries and films:
OLN's Mysterious Encounters: "Caddo Critter", Southern Fried Bigfoot, Travel Channel's Weird Travels: "Bigfoot", History Channel's MonsterQuest: "Swamp Stalker", The Wild Man of the Navidad, Destination America's Monsters and Mysteries in America: Texas Terror - Lake Worth Monster, Animal Planet's Finding Bigfoot: Return to Boggy Creek and Beast of the Bayou.
Yup. The proof is in, as they say, the pudding. The difference is clear and striking, and ne’er the twain shall meet. There is also the matter of the knee rotation, which is so different from homo sapiens it’s ridiculous. Someone might be able to train himself to do it, but, unlike Patty’s walk, it would look forced and absurd.
That was very informative, and hard to argue with.
I guess we’ve wasted a lot of time looking for a zipper.
haha… I love it!
Wow! Great video! I haven’t seen this analysis before, but it sure seems to knock a hole in the idea that Patty was a person in a suit. I wonder if the differences in angle have to do with the proportion of knee to ankle length and total body height? Patty appears to have a smaller knee to ankle percentage of total height than the humans pictured.
While I think Patty is in fact a real Sasquatch, I don’t put a lot of weight into this argument, as this “21 Degrees of Separation” argument is easily reversible to fit a skeptics argument. If someone were in a suit, wearing clown feet or big “Bigfoot” feet, then it would be much harder to walk in, and, by nature, you lift up your knee even more, and bend your leg a lot more once you start walking, and, you can almost replicate the bent kneed gait of Patty. Try this yourself. This video isn’t exactly proof positive, at least in my view.
Look, Austin…. Nothing will change the ignorance of professional doubters. It’s high time we stopped worrying about what they think.
It’s of absolutely no consequence. If one helped them fix a flat tire, they’d still debunk it.
Here’s my bottom line:
In all my days I never saw a person walk like Patty.
And just about every other bigfoot video I’ve seen shows….somebody walking like all the other people I’ve seen.
To pile on top of the improbabilities surrounding Pattyfake, one would have to postulate that the first bigfoot actor in history was given the task, in a huge and cumbersome suit, of concocting a walk – on the spot, first take, on a wild river bar – so subtly yet distinctly unlike the human norm as to convince scientists with directly relevant training, scientists who knew full well they were branding themselves pariahs by taking it seriously.
Not buying that. It’s silly as presuming somebody made that suit.
While I do like this analysis very much it needs to be taken one step further to help deter the skeptics still out there by having someone put on a bigfoot suit and walk (hopefully someone around 7 foot tall) to see if there is any difference in degrees.
Very interesting and very compelling. Now I want someone who is capable of putting this up (I am not), take a video of Shaquille O’neil who actually is the size of a Bigfoot at over 7′ tall and has enormous feet of around 16″ -17″ long walking, to see if his shin angle is also totally human at 52 degrees. If Shaq’s gait angles are in human range than we got something here and I’m willing to bet that they are.
If Shaq can walk normally with his size feet than perhaps we are not looking at a person in a costume. I feel that the odd walk in the Patterson film is related to heavy body weight and hip size/placement.
Also, a note on the statement that people walk like the figure in the Patterson film when they are wearing “Clown feet”…not so. I went to Youtube and looked at a clown parade. Lots of people wearing oversized shoes but none of them actually raised their shin angle, in fact if anything they shuffled around with less angle than usual but most seemed to be walking and running rather normally – clown feet and all. Go take a look.
I’d really like to see an actual expert talk more about the mechanics of Patty’s gait, but this video brought up two points in my mind. First, Patty isn’t really “walking” here, but rather some kind of fast stride. Humans would start to jog or even run if they needed to move any faster than a walk, while Patty’s moving quickly here while keeping her feet on the ground.
Secondly, why is the angle different? The best I can come up with is that Patty has proportionally more upper-body mass than a human, so certain gait changes are needed to keep the body balanced. So the high trailing shin is counterbalancing the heavy torso leaning forward, same with the swinging arms.
Of course, this also means that a human wearing an unbalanced suit might similarly compensate.
Yes indeed, a lot more upper-body mass. Which, IMO, makes Shaq, er, unsuitable for the task. The typical reported Squatchfoot is at least two, three hundred pounds heavier. So maybe there’s something to JE_McKellar’s theory.
Too bad Andre the Giant is long gone. That would be a much better test than Shaq. But wait… there IS footage of Andre in a Bigfoot suit… but it probably doesn’t show the gait from the right angle to be of use. Many will recall Andre’s Bigfoot stint on The Six Million Dollar Man. Or was it eight?
It’s not a Bigfoot suit, but there is a lot of footage of Peter Mayhew, the English actor who played Chewbacca in the 3 Starwars films, plus his standins and then they added some more of them in one of the later films. He had a kind of shambling, pigeon-toed walk and I don’t know if it was just him, or that was forced on him by the mechanics of the suit or by the director. In any case, it was nothing like Patty and he is still alive, although rather elderly and perhaps beset with arthritis.
I remember sometime in the last ten years that a show on one of the cable science channels examined the mechanics of Patty’s gait from the film, using those dots that they put on a figure for motion capture. They tried to make various athletic young men recreate it, and were totally unable to do it. They convincingly showed that the human body and specifically leg and foot is not jointed so as to move like Patty does, and concluded that whatever was being filmed could not have been a human in a fur suit. Does anyone remember this? The people doing the show were main stream scientists and were rather shaken to come to this conclusion, as they seemed to come into the experiment with the “man-in-suit” mindset.
There’s some video of Andre’s gait here.
That video of Andre as a Sasquatch and the 6 million dollar man was hilarious, but it did appear to me that Andre’s costumed gait clearly showed he did not lift his legs high at all. Nothing even close to Patty in the slightest.
I like it. It’s a clear, measurable factor and is replicable with testing. Pop a dude into a bigfoot suit and have them try to replicate the walk over uneven ground. Furthermore, it’s something that can be used to evaluate other purported videos of Sasquatch that claim to show it walking (given that you can see the legs clearly).
The walk is very similar to one I use when being stealthy in the woods, the heel is pulled back higher than normal so that the foot travels parallel to the ground before coming down. This causes the foot to slide under leaves/ brush/ etc… concealing signs of passage… as opposed to lifting the knee and crushing them down from the top. Try it sometime. Moving this way is somewhat ungainly (imagine a stork) and takes quite a bit of getting used to… Patty is a lesson in fluidity. This natural version of my affected walk would be the logical result of a biped born and bred in the boonies…
Great observation, Alamo. And wouldn’t it be great to see our Suitman try and navigate rocky, unrehearsed terrain and maintain that walk?
Lol.Both funny and hard to disagree with.
More and more it seems this PG film is as important as the Zapruder film as far as historical purposes go. I believe it probably is as good as proof there is short of a body.
When humans walk we lift the knee and kick the heel forward, striking first with the heel, then rolling forward onto the ball of our foot… our arch springing us forward. Bigfoot has no arch (as evidenced by the footprints). A flat foot causes a tendency to pronate. Here’s a video of what I’m talking about, note also the basic mechanics of the human walk I noted above:
You know what would compensate for the natural tendency of flat feet to pronate? An in line step. This would shift the weight to the outside of the foot, evening out distribution. Likewise, perhaps the difference in angle caused by lifting up the heel and coming down on the whole foot as opposed to lifting the knee and coming down on just the heel is a biomechanical compensation for the lack of an arch.
A wise man once said, “If it moves like a human… it ain’t a Sasquatch.”, the mid-tarsal break guarantees this. The unique gait we’re seeing is a perfectly elegant solution to the bipedal walk by an animal with slightly different anatomy than us.
Great stuff, Alamo! We have all the proof any reasonable person could need. If they wanted to see it, and consider it without prejudice. William: are you aware that at least a few segments of the Zapruder film seem to have been filmed in advance, and elements from different times are matted together, sometimes rather clumsily? Just Google “zapruder film fake” and you will find questions aplenty! At least the Patterson-Gimlin film is genuine – we just PROVED it!
Was Andre the Giant bionic as well?
G. de La Hoya: It’s open for debate. Andre was well-known for drinking a case and a half of beer before matches. That’s outta reach for most of us. He got arrested once for drinking over 60 beers (I forget the precise number) in a hotel bar! That could be considered “bionic”!
” Was Andre the Giant bionic as well?”
Inconceivable…
A friend and fellow truth seeker has suggested that perhaps the gait could also be attributed to a suit and accompanying footwear. It’s a good point and worthy of examination. I’ve done a bit of SCUBA and know that walking with fins necessitates lifting the toes and knees higher than normal and widening the stance. Here’s a video of what that looks like… imagine trying this in rough terrain:
Their walk on the video is exaggerated by the relative size of the footwear, but any kind of unnatural extension of the foot will cause this to some degree. Look at the Andre video again (Mr. De la Hoya is correct, in the TV episode Bigfoot is a robot created by aliens – a reference to the Edwards AFB Bigfoot/ UFO meme) at 3:24 and 6:30 Andre can be seen exhibiting the same motion to a lesser extent. The gait observed in the P/G film is the exact opposite of that of a man wearing something giving him bigger than normal feet. In fact, using it in a suit would be a near impossibility… add to that the rough terrain and it becomes… inconceivable.