I am in receipt of a new alleged Bigfoot video, the YouTube version of which is hereinafter appended. A fellow emailed it to me with the request that I help him “get it into the right hands”, because, you know, routing Bigfoot videos to the appropriate cryptozoologist is what I’m all about.

These are actually kind of fun to get. At a first glance, there’s nothing in there that’s inconsistent with a guy in a suit. If a guy had a suit like this and his homey filmed him in it, this is exactly what you’d expect the video to look like. By Occam’s Razor, this is a guy in a suit; because the other possibility requires the introduction of the assumption that an unknown species of great ape roams about. But I hate to stop there; that’s too easy.

First let’s see where and when the video was made: Just north of Greenhorn, Oregon in October of 2009. That appears consistent with the foliage seen in the video, about the right season judging by the leaves, and I probably wouldn’t expect to see any snow on the ground. John E Walker is what’s on the YouTube page, but that’s not the name he emailed me with; and though the Scotch Whiskey reference calls attention to itself, there are people with that name. He says is that it was shot on a JVC Everio GZ-HD7 3CCD camcorder, which is a real model of camera. The picture looks pretty good, so probably a 3CCD, but that’s about all I can guess. I didn’t find anything in the mechanical details of the video to prove or disprove its authenticity.

So that doesn’t leave us much to go on. Maybe it is a Bigfoot. Maybe it’s a guy in a suit, one that flares out bellbottom style, like my own cheap-ass gorilla suit does. Maybe it’s an autonomous robot in a suit. Maybe it’s a Bigfoot in a Bigfoot suit. Maybe it’s an example of high-end composite work combined with low-end 3D modeling, all rendered on Renderman.

The fact is that we can’t really know or conclude much of anything about this video, and the million others like it. We can’t prove it’s a fake any more than we can prove it’s a real Bigfoot. What it is is crappy evidence. It’s not testable. It’s fun, and it’s interesting, but its value as evidence is zero. Its value as an anecdote is that it suggests a direction for research. So to all who feel motivated: Grab your 3CCD cameras and head on up to Greenhorn, Oregon. A bellbottomed Bigfoot might be waiting for you.