Thanks, the curse of Odin, Bigfoot and Piltdown
Anyway not a lot of time here but….
Thanks to everybody who came last night. It was fun on our end. And for those of you who missed it – shame upon thee, beware the wrath of Odin. He will ensure you do not win the lottery this week. (I know it’s not much as curses from the gods go but the he’s a pretty old guy even by god standards so that’s about what he can deliver these days).
No I’m not going to explain that.
Meantime meantime. I’m reading this rather engrossing little book called Sasquatch Legend Meets Science – where it seems for just about the first time, the evidence is looked at as evidence, as in What does this footprint say about who made it (and is it a fake and what does that mean?) and the like...rather than jumping like a lot of pro-Bigfoot books do to speculation about mating habits and what not. (Well not really but you get the picture)
Anyway – there is, as one might expect a lot on the famous/infamous Patterson film. They don’t come right out and say yes this authentic but they surely sound like they think it is.
Or, which is my current thinking on the subject, if it’s a fake – it’s a fantastically good fake. One that 40 years later holds up under extremely close analysis.
Now I have read some opinions on the film that say “it’s a fake” however there seems to be a bit of circular reasoning here – the line of thought goes “Bigfoot doesn’t exist, therefore this is a fake.” Which I think alas says more about the viewer than the film.
The only way this could be faked is by a man in a suit – cgi being totally unknown in 1967. If it’s a man in a suit it’s a fantastically good suit. (the folks who has said that have said this is a crude forgery may know a lot about scientific things but jack squat about how men in ape suits look. ) The state of the art of make up in 1968 gave us the ape men in the first part of 2001 – and while the faces are very well done – as where the main actor’s faces in Planet of the Apes released the same year) it’s still obviously a suit – the hair doesn’t look natural and you don’t see the muscles moving underneath (as you do in the Patterson film by the way). And that was in a big budget film using state of the art special effects. Hell even years later in the 1976 ell eKing Kong – Rich Baker – even with all the money he needed at his disposal couldn’t get that effect. Try as they might, a man in a suit still looks like a man in a suit.
Check out Congo – made in 1995 – which used guys in suits because the CGI programs of the time (Jurassic Park had just come out) couldn’t do hair effects very well.
Sorry just having a flash back to Congo – god what an awful film. I need to see it again I think.
Help me.
Anyway as I was reading the analysis and reactions – especially the negative ones. I started thinking about fakes. And one special fake came to mind.
The Piltdown man.
And what is interesting is comparing the reactions of the mainstream scientific community to it as opposed to the Patterson film.
Unlike the Patterson film there is no doubt that Piltdown was a fake. The faker (most writers think Charles Dawson was the guy but that’s for another day) took a piece of human skull, a fossil organ tang jaw and some chimpanzee teeth and by various means (staining, breaking off parts, filing with a rasp and the like) made them look like they came from one creature.
Now the really interesting thing here is the reception these doctored bones and teeth were given when they were discovered. Aside from one or two skeptical comments (mostly along the lines that these pieces just didn’t belong together) the find was accepted as completely genuine.
Now yes there were a lot of differences between the two – Dawson knew Smith Woodward who was the head of what we now call Paleontology at the British Museum – it being 1912 tabloid Television didn’t exist, and the world was a very different place really.
Still. The universally accepted reason the fake succeeded (until 1953 when dating tests finally proved it was a fake) was that initially it accurately matched what scientists expected to see if an early man was discovered. A Large brained animal with an ape’s jaw (as opposed to the current view, born of more fossil humanoids coming to life, that walking came first then the human style jaw and lastly the brain) Parts of the forgery itself – notably the teeth and their wear – were pretty crude (the faked filed the teeth down flat to duplicate a more human tooth wear but the wear is obviously not natural and the teeth aren’t aligned right to cause that wear pattern – some one did notice this in 1923 but nobody paid any attention.) but the understanding of what the Marks (scientists) were looking for was very profound.
I don’t have the time today to craft this as precisely as I would like – but the upshot was, that if someone as clever as the faker had to be was going to fake the Patterson film they wouldn’t have added some of the film’s more unusual aspects – one making it a female and two the sagitail crest.
Simply put a faker who wanted this to have a chance at being accepted wouldn’t have made it a female. Science and even more so in 1967 is a pretty male oriented in its world view – a male Bigfoot would have a better chance of acceptance than the film of a female. And even if the faker needed the suit to be that of a female (control mechanism maybe- bladders who knows) they would have know enough not to include the sagital crest (the point at the top of the head – it forms an anchor for jaw muscles and typically found only in the males of the great apes, most notably in Gorillas.).
I’m going to have to come back to this and write it better, but my main point is that anybody out to fake the Patterson film would not have willingly included these details in the film if the goal was to bamboozle or use the film to earn money or some other reward.
Well no more time to day.
Peace Love Odin!
Thanks to everybody who came last night. It was fun on our end. And for those of you who missed it – shame upon thee, beware the wrath of Odin. He will ensure you do not win the lottery this week. (I know it’s not much as curses from the gods go but the he’s a pretty old guy even by god standards so that’s about what he can deliver these days).
No I’m not going to explain that.
Meantime meantime. I’m reading this rather engrossing little book called Sasquatch Legend Meets Science – where it seems for just about the first time, the evidence is looked at as evidence, as in What does this footprint say about who made it (and is it a fake and what does that mean?) and the like...rather than jumping like a lot of pro-Bigfoot books do to speculation about mating habits and what not. (Well not really but you get the picture)
Anyway – there is, as one might expect a lot on the famous/infamous Patterson film. They don’t come right out and say yes this authentic but they surely sound like they think it is.
Or, which is my current thinking on the subject, if it’s a fake – it’s a fantastically good fake. One that 40 years later holds up under extremely close analysis.
Now I have read some opinions on the film that say “it’s a fake” however there seems to be a bit of circular reasoning here – the line of thought goes “Bigfoot doesn’t exist, therefore this is a fake.” Which I think alas says more about the viewer than the film.
The only way this could be faked is by a man in a suit – cgi being totally unknown in 1967. If it’s a man in a suit it’s a fantastically good suit. (the folks who has said that have said this is a crude forgery may know a lot about scientific things but jack squat about how men in ape suits look. ) The state of the art of make up in 1968 gave us the ape men in the first part of 2001 – and while the faces are very well done – as where the main actor’s faces in Planet of the Apes released the same year) it’s still obviously a suit – the hair doesn’t look natural and you don’t see the muscles moving underneath (as you do in the Patterson film by the way). And that was in a big budget film using state of the art special effects. Hell even years later in the 1976 ell eKing Kong – Rich Baker – even with all the money he needed at his disposal couldn’t get that effect. Try as they might, a man in a suit still looks like a man in a suit.
Check out Congo – made in 1995 – which used guys in suits because the CGI programs of the time (Jurassic Park had just come out) couldn’t do hair effects very well.
Sorry just having a flash back to Congo – god what an awful film. I need to see it again I think.
Help me.
Anyway as I was reading the analysis and reactions – especially the negative ones. I started thinking about fakes. And one special fake came to mind.
The Piltdown man.
And what is interesting is comparing the reactions of the mainstream scientific community to it as opposed to the Patterson film.
Unlike the Patterson film there is no doubt that Piltdown was a fake. The faker (most writers think Charles Dawson was the guy but that’s for another day) took a piece of human skull, a fossil organ tang jaw and some chimpanzee teeth and by various means (staining, breaking off parts, filing with a rasp and the like) made them look like they came from one creature.
Now the really interesting thing here is the reception these doctored bones and teeth were given when they were discovered. Aside from one or two skeptical comments (mostly along the lines that these pieces just didn’t belong together) the find was accepted as completely genuine.
Now yes there were a lot of differences between the two – Dawson knew Smith Woodward who was the head of what we now call Paleontology at the British Museum – it being 1912 tabloid Television didn’t exist, and the world was a very different place really.
Still. The universally accepted reason the fake succeeded (until 1953 when dating tests finally proved it was a fake) was that initially it accurately matched what scientists expected to see if an early man was discovered. A Large brained animal with an ape’s jaw (as opposed to the current view, born of more fossil humanoids coming to life, that walking came first then the human style jaw and lastly the brain) Parts of the forgery itself – notably the teeth and their wear – were pretty crude (the faked filed the teeth down flat to duplicate a more human tooth wear but the wear is obviously not natural and the teeth aren’t aligned right to cause that wear pattern – some one did notice this in 1923 but nobody paid any attention.) but the understanding of what the Marks (scientists) were looking for was very profound.
I don’t have the time today to craft this as precisely as I would like – but the upshot was, that if someone as clever as the faker had to be was going to fake the Patterson film they wouldn’t have added some of the film’s more unusual aspects – one making it a female and two the sagitail crest.
Simply put a faker who wanted this to have a chance at being accepted wouldn’t have made it a female. Science and even more so in 1967 is a pretty male oriented in its world view – a male Bigfoot would have a better chance of acceptance than the film of a female. And even if the faker needed the suit to be that of a female (control mechanism maybe- bladders who knows) they would have know enough not to include the sagital crest (the point at the top of the head – it forms an anchor for jaw muscles and typically found only in the males of the great apes, most notably in Gorillas.).
I’m going to have to come back to this and write it better, but my main point is that anybody out to fake the Patterson film would not have willingly included these details in the film if the goal was to bamboozle or use the film to earn money or some other reward.
Well no more time to day.
Peace Love Odin!
posted by Unknown at 10:56 AM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home