Roe Rendering Root of Renowned Footage?
Posted by: Loren Coleman on June 24th, 2007
Daniel Loxton, editor of Junior Skeptic magazine, wrote to Cryptomundo on April 24, 2007: “It’s the Roe sketch that suggests itself most strongly as Patterson’s inspiration…”
What do you think?
This Willian Roe drawing was done in 1958 by his daughter from his description of what he said he saw in 1955 in British Columbia.
Did any of you catch the curl on the brow of the Albert Ostman Old Woman drawing by Roger Patterson?
That curly description by Ostman is the inspiration for Ivan Sanderson’s drawing of Sasquatch, and the Jim McClarin/Willow Creek Bigfoot statue’s browridge (above), as well.
The closeup of the Roe drawing done by Kunstler in Sanderson’s 1961 ABSM book
Was it the William Roe drawing by Morton Kunstler in True Magazine that actually serves as the model for the Bigfoot suit that no one has been able to locate, produce, or find? Kunstler’s illustration shows the hint of a breast, the almost classic Patterson-Gimlin swinging of the arms, and even the famous black line down the back. Or was William Roe describing a real unknown primate that is merely confirmed with the filming of a similar cryptid 12 years later?
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About Loren Coleman
Loren Coleman is one of the world’s leading cryptozoologists, some say “the” leading living cryptozoologist. Certainly, he is acknowledged as the current living American researcher and writer who has most popularized cryptozoology in the late 20th and early 21st centuries.
Starting his fieldwork and investigations in 1960, after traveling and trekking extensively in pursuit of cryptozoological mysteries, Coleman began writing to share his experiences in 1969. An honorary member of Ivan T. Sanderson’s Society for the Investigation of the Unexplained in the 1970s, Coleman has been bestowed with similar honorary memberships of the North Idaho College Cryptozoology Club in 1983, and in subsequent years, that of the British Columbia Scientific Cryptozoology Club, CryptoSafari International, and other international organizations. He was also a Life Member and Benefactor of the International Society of Cryptozoology (now-defunct).
Loren Coleman’s daily blog, as a member of the Cryptomundo Team, served as an ongoing avenue of communication for the ever-growing body of cryptozoo news from 2005 through 2013. He returned as an infrequent contributor beginning Halloween week of 2015.
Coleman is the founder in 2003, and current director of the International Cryptozoology Museum in Portland, Maine.
Tell Roe to Study a little more so he can become a SR sceptic.
If there’s an ostensibly accurate drawing of a creature that someone said was seen somewhere, somewhen, and later someone else makes a movie of a similar creature, and someone else goes thru the film and chooses one frame in which the creature looks very much like the one in the drawing – coarse, bulky, heavy-browed, hair-covered, long-armed, female – then OF COURSE they will look alike – THEY’RE THE SAME SPECIES!!!
That doesn’t mean the drawing served as a design model for the creature shown in the film!
We knew pretty much what the coelacanth looked like from fossil evidence and extrapolative drawings, and now there’s photos and videos of a living creature! Does that mean the fossils & drawings served as models for the pictured piscean? OR -do those videos show a guy in a coelacanth suit?
fuzzy’s right. You’d expect similar features on a real creature. To me this detail only strengthens the film. Why go to all that trouble to design a suit with breasts when one without it would do?
I sure wish all these people would put as much energy into finding the darn thing as they do in trying to debunk each other!
Show me a complete costume made in 1968 by the movie industry or anyone else that matches the quality of what we see in the Patterson film. Partial costumes do not count, make up jobs do not count.
I’ve looked, the closest was in Planet of the Apes but those were only partial costumes, not full body.
The walking illustation looks like a harry grumpy old man…kinda like my uncle.
Costume… what are you talking about.
It’s clearly Rosie O’Donnell… am I the only one who can see that? 🙂
Okay, I have a slightly different take, but follow me:
If the PG film was a fake the creature would have displayed the same wrong assumptions made by Roe and Patterson when they made the drawings. During life drawing classes (Yes I am an artist) the first thing you are taught is to truly “see” what you are drawing. Art is a language and like most language it consists of conventions drawn from experience. Novices tend to draw concepts, not what they see. For example if any of you were asked to draw a rather complex object from memory and compare it with the true object you will notice that it looks nothing like the object, yet it is recognizable as the object being drawn. Like someone who is trying to spell a rather difficult word phonetically, it will be wrong but understandable. In both sets of drawings we have visual “short hand.” For example both drawn arms have the appropriate proportions for a chimp or even a modified human. The PG film, however, shows an upper arm that is proportionally compressed from what one would expect on a primate. It appears longer because of the sheer size of the shoulder. I could go on, but on your time compare head size to body length, etc; and you will find that both drawings depict what one expects to find not what we actually see in the film. If the PG film were faked it would have fallen into the same traps inadvertently by trying to use the Roe art as a template.
Sorry to be so long-winded, but if you want to look at a costume that reminds me (proportionally) of sasquatch I would recommend the Thing from the Fantastic Four. Michael Chiklas’ prosthetics in the film give him a very similar appearance. But instead of supporting the hoax position it shows how difficult it is for a human in such an outfit to move even with all of Big-Budget-Hollywood’s movie magic. Yet PG were able to send some poor shmuck in even more extreme prosthetics across rocky/muddy terrain effortlessly? Talk at ya’ll later.
Joppa said: “Show me a complete costume made in 1968 by the movie industry or anyone else that matches the quality of what we see in the Patterson film.”
If you look at the 1966 Japanese monster movie “War of the Gargantuas” you see not one, but two well done giant hairy hominids. Actually there is a 1955 Japanese movie that features an ‘Abominable Snowman’ that features a really great creature costume (unfortunately this film is only available in the U.S. as the highly edited movie titled “Half Human”). Those cinematic monster costumes may not look convincing to you on tape or DVD, but I believe that the Zapruder-like quality of the P/G film obscures a lot of details that would betray a man in a costume.
Roe’s account sketch shows a much thinner animal than the PGF subject, which would have been easier to hoax.
I don’t see where the comaparisons being drawn in any other place but the breasts, and if an animal is in the same species and has breasts it stands to reason that those breasts wouldn’t be wildly different.
A supporter of the negative evidence for the existence of sasquatch is, in my opinion, doing nothing to support his or her claim by comparing a film clip to a sketch.
Maybe if the sketch was drawn out as a blueprint on how such a costume could be made would count as evidence, but comparing breasts is really out on a limb.
I agree, had the Roe drawing been followed more closely for the PG film the creature would have been made to be thinner and with longer hair.
Have any of you ever noticed the one distinct difference between the PG film and most other “authentic bigfoot” films? The creature in the PG film is very thick with a stout frame and thick neck along with short hair like you’d expect. Most other videos feature a creature with much longer hair that could easily hide zippers and the fact that the person inside the suit is not thick and muscled like you’d expect a primitive hominid to be.
Consider one more thing about the PG video, most other videos follow the formula of showing the creature briefly, the camerman/woman freaking out and then the camera going nuts, and in all of these videos you cannot see the creatures reaction to the presence of a human being. But in the PG film you can clearly see that the creature is moving quickly and somewhat perturbed by the fact that someone with a camera is watching it. The reaction seems too natural to be faked. Or should I say that if the PG film was a fake they must have spent months if not years in research in primate behaviour, physical build (for costume design), and must have taken at least 10-20 good takes before getting it right.
As a filmmaker myself I can say that getting something to look “natural” is not nearly as easy as it seems. If the creature (or man in a suit) had howled at the cameraman and chased him it would have been EASIER than having it move naturally and look back toward the camera the way it did, because natural looking acting as a human is difficult enough, but getting a person in a suit to look that natural must’ve been extremely difficult.
As I side note I’d like to add that as a professional editor I’ve got a trained eye for what I’d call “camera awareness”. For instance if I’m editing a scene and I pick up on just a brief moment of the actor “pretending” they are a character instead of really feeling it I can identify it pretty much immediately. Of all the films I’ve seen the PG film seems to have no moments of this whatsoever, so as I stated before if it was a hoax I think it would have taken many attempts before finally getting that perfect take where the reactions seemed 100% natural.
Come on though guys and gals, we have to admit that’s still one hell of a coincidence.
UKcryptid: not being sure what you meant I’m just gonna go with how it sounds. Correct me if I’m wrong.
If I see two whitetail does twelve years apart, is that one hell of a coincidence, or just two females of the same species? Both Roe’s animal and Patty were seen in areas that happen to be historical epicenters of sightings, which might, well, indicate population centers for the species.
There’s something fundamentally grasping-at-straws – already pointed out here – about saying that a sketch based on an actual sighting of an animal is a model for a fake done twelve years later. You’d have to put down the straws for a minute, and tell me why you think Roe is lying.
It’s actually more logical to just say two guys saw female sasquatch. Oh. I’d expect, if population dynamics for other species hold with this one, that there’d be considerably more females than males. Which makes Patty and Roey more likely to be seen than their male counterparts.
Kamoeba: you can’t just get the costume, and I’m betting the ones you cite wouldn’t do much for me, you have to get every other aspect of the hoax – how you got the guy to fit the costume, how you got him there, how you coached him to act in a way no other man in an ape suit has ever acted (i.e., like a real ape), how you knew where P/G were going to be when, or how P/G themselves did this when no one who knows them seems to think they could pull it off. Et cetera.
Fuzzy said earlier exactly the same thing I said on the other post about this sketch. Two of the same species are going to look similar, so what is all of the confusion over the similarity of the sketch and the footage? Is this really such a coincidence that a sketch of one creature should resemble,( gasp), a video of the same species? I really do not see all of the fuss being made here over this sketch and I do not buy all the theories that this must somehow prove that PG was a hoax. Maybe PG was a hoax, nobody knows and I have seen nothing to prove it either way, but saying this sketch somehow proves it is pretty out there, I feel. It could also prove that a female Bigfoot was drawn and then another one was filmed years later.
As I’ve said more than once, mystery_man: when the sasquatch is the topic, common sense seems to take a powder.
Here’s a dose of same: Roe saw a female sasquatch. Twelve years later, so did Patterson. He had a camera.
I’m pleased to see my off-hand comment generate so much discussion. I think the possibility of a connection between the Roe sketch and Patterson creature deserves a closer look. No matter how you look at it, the similarities are striking and important.
If the Roe case was bogus, then that would cast serious doubt on the Patterson-Gimlin film. Now, in fact there is no positive evidence that the Roe case was fake, but there is plenty of reason for caution: the only evidence for (or against) Roe’s report is his word, and that is of unknown value because (as I’ve written elsewhere) no Bigfooter ever spoke to Roe. Nobody questioned Roe in person, spoke to him on the phone, visited the site, or even looked Roe in the face. We know almost nothing about Roe. We don’t even have the original telling of his tale, which appeared in some British Columbia media outlet (newspaper? radio?) but has since been lost. That doesn’t mean the Roe sketch was not based on a real animal sighting—but frankly, no one knows that it was.
If it should be the case in the future that evidence falsifying the Roe story ever does emerge, the Patterson film will also be seriously damaged.
On the other hand, if the Patterson film is a fake (I am persuaded that it is, but we all know the arguments, and I won’t repeat them here), then the Roe sketch certainly does “suggest itself most strongly as Patterson’s inspiration,” regardless of whether the Roe case was genuine or not. As UKCryptid puts it above, that is one hell of a coincidence. (That artistic relationship would interesting, at least to skeptics, because one of our functions is to act as historians of hoaxes and scams.)
That said, many posters here make the point that the similarity between the eyewitness evidence of Roe and the film evidence from Patterson is equally consistent with the hypothesis that both are accurate representations of the same species of undiscovered primate. This is of course correct—by themselves, these two pieces of evidence are consistent with several scenarios, and the sasquatch hypothesis is one of them.
It is my opinion that the Roe sighting had nothing whatsoever to do with the P/G film. However, it has long been my contention that Albert Ostman’s “story” was a most creatively fleshed out version of William Roe’s sighting. Roe’s sighting was backed up by an affidavit, was told in a straight forward manner with few flourishes. As for Ostman’s story, he admittedly came forward with it, 33 years after the alleged event and AFTER reading of Roe’s sighting. I feel he wrote it to entertain himself and shared it with others in the same vein. They ran with it and he was interviewed and told it so often he may have even come to believe it, himself. The only thing in his favor is that his story never wavered or changed, but that is the only thing that is favorable, IMHO. People say it is credible because of the definitive details, however, to me it is just the opposite. Some details are totally unbelievable. A final word, tobacco! I think not!
Judy: I never know which foot to look at when someone suggests with a straight face that the Ostman case describes a family group of real animals. It just seems to me such an obvious piece of folklore-styled yarn-spinning that I can’t bring myself to take it even somewhat seriously… (Come, on, tricking the giant to make your escape? That’s not a wildlife encounter, it’s Puss-in-Boots.)
Daniel: Can’t argue with anything you’ve said.
And Ostman ain’t in MY database. He’s like Ray Wallace: trouble, if you’re a proponent, and better left out of the conversation.
The vast majority of sas encounter reports read like real wildlife encounters.
Daniel: You would be amazed at how many intelligent, knowledgeable people believe in the credibility of Ostman’s story. I don’t mean this as a criticism of anyone, however, I have a very linear, pragmatic mind and if all of the details of a story don’t make absolute sense to me, I find no credibility in a story. There are just too many incredible facts in Ostman’s story for me to find it believable. I could list them, however, it would take up too much room!
Another major problem I have seen in the forum environment is the tendency to ‘throw the baby out with the bathwater’ effect.
I have found it quite amazing how some very detailed claims have been discarded by a group, simply because there is one single element that the majority does not buy. This is a very short-sighted investigatory method and everyone should be aware of the hazards. We also should be open-minded enough to recognize that we don’t understand everything on this earth, and that maybe some things can’t be explained by what we do know. If the opposite were the case, we’d have the sasquatch mystery all wrapped up long ago.
Patty is/was a real living breathing female sasquatch. Anything similar between Roe and Patty is mere coincidence, that’s all. If Patty were a guy in a suit, then they must have made a male version too that walked across the road after midnight 15 miles or so inside the southern entrance of Yosemite National Park from Mariposa some 10 years later. And believe me, he would have to have been one big dude in that suit. Muscular legs larger than my then 32″ waist. Not to mention he would need to be fearless to be walking around in pitch dark in steep country, and where bears regularly weigh ober 450 lbs.
Patty is the real thing, that is my testimony only as someone who has seen these creatures close up and personal. Take it or leave it, it’s your prerogative.
There are certainly multiple questionable elements to Mr. Ostman’s story, not just one, however, everyone has a right to their own opinions.
of course- daniel is right. If PG is fake then Roe or other images might be the inspiration. But then so are some of his respondants- if PG isn’t fake then they won’t have been inspiration (unless patty modelled herself on the drawings..)
But the fact is we dont know whether it was fake or not (whatever we might suspect). A such, the fact that there is a resemblance carries exactly the same weight for the argument that it might have been faked as it does for the argument that it wasn’t (it is entirely consistent with both).
Unless we have presupposed the answer to the q of whether bf exists (one way or the other), the weight we give the resemblance in our reasoning should be, in fact, precisely none.