Post by Deleted on Jul 21, 2005 23:59:54 GMT -5
I just received a DVD, Rocky Mountain Bigfoot, from Amazon.
It is an hour documentary produced, apparently by some graduate students from the University of Idaho at Pocatello.
It has some interesting issues.
1) Michael Shermer. First I think Michael Shermer is a horse's ass. Why? Because anyone can sit around in an office and just say, "No". Or, "No way". I know he seems very intellectual and important in his interviews, but I don't think there is any heroism or trickiness to being a skeptic. Having said that, during the documentary they did a brief interview with Michael Shermer as he visited ISU on the lecture tour. He would not come right out and say that there was no such thing as Bigfoot. He didn't say it existed, or that it was possible, but he would not say it couldn't exist. And having seen him pontificate on other shows about various topics, I found is non-denial interesting.
2) Fake prints: The producers of the show got people together and faked prints. They took a pumpkin and carved a Bigfoot foot out of it. Then they had specialists manufacture dermal ridges. Then they went out, made impressions with the fake print and casted them. After that they took the casts to Jeff Meldrum who teaches at ISU and basically said, hey we found these prints, we casted them, what do you think? He, to the tee, described the whole process to the film crew and how they faked them. So, they came to the conclusion that they couldn't fake Dr. Meldrum.
3) They revisited two areas where sightings occured south of Pocatello in the Portneuf Mountains. Two different sightings probably within 100 square miles of each other. For the one "Witness" it was the first time he had been back since the sighting approximately 10 years earlier. They found his saw oil can that he had dropped when he saw the Sasquatch and left the area in a hurry. The other sighting, the man was proported to be on a horse and the Sasquatch came right at them in a somewhat aggressive manner.
4) They went back to the site of the second sighting and stayed over in sub zero weather. They hoped to have an encounter. They didn't.
Over all Rocky Mountain Bigfoot, considering it was done by a handful of graduate students, on a limited budget, is probably one of the better documentaries I have seen, and was worth whatever I paid for it.
Jon
It is an hour documentary produced, apparently by some graduate students from the University of Idaho at Pocatello.
It has some interesting issues.
1) Michael Shermer. First I think Michael Shermer is a horse's ass. Why? Because anyone can sit around in an office and just say, "No". Or, "No way". I know he seems very intellectual and important in his interviews, but I don't think there is any heroism or trickiness to being a skeptic. Having said that, during the documentary they did a brief interview with Michael Shermer as he visited ISU on the lecture tour. He would not come right out and say that there was no such thing as Bigfoot. He didn't say it existed, or that it was possible, but he would not say it couldn't exist. And having seen him pontificate on other shows about various topics, I found is non-denial interesting.
2) Fake prints: The producers of the show got people together and faked prints. They took a pumpkin and carved a Bigfoot foot out of it. Then they had specialists manufacture dermal ridges. Then they went out, made impressions with the fake print and casted them. After that they took the casts to Jeff Meldrum who teaches at ISU and basically said, hey we found these prints, we casted them, what do you think? He, to the tee, described the whole process to the film crew and how they faked them. So, they came to the conclusion that they couldn't fake Dr. Meldrum.
3) They revisited two areas where sightings occured south of Pocatello in the Portneuf Mountains. Two different sightings probably within 100 square miles of each other. For the one "Witness" it was the first time he had been back since the sighting approximately 10 years earlier. They found his saw oil can that he had dropped when he saw the Sasquatch and left the area in a hurry. The other sighting, the man was proported to be on a horse and the Sasquatch came right at them in a somewhat aggressive manner.
4) They went back to the site of the second sighting and stayed over in sub zero weather. They hoped to have an encounter. They didn't.
Over all Rocky Mountain Bigfoot, considering it was done by a handful of graduate students, on a limited budget, is probably one of the better documentaries I have seen, and was worth whatever I paid for it.
Jon