Galileo invented the telescope – right?

Well, not exactly, but many people still give him that credit.

Copernicus was the first to argue for a revision of Ptolemy’s model of the solar system – right?

Nope, wrong again. Muslim astronomer Ibn al-Shatir preceded Copernicus in that achievement by hundreds of years.

John Green was the first to note the disparity of limb proportions in Patty as compared with normal human proportions – right?

Not quite.

As is often the case, the man or woman commonly credited for an idea or accomplishment may not, in fact, be the responsible person. Historians (and modern chroniclers) sometimes credit the best-known person associated with a concept for having developed the concept.

Such appears to be the case with John Green and the limb proportion theory as a means of validating the Patterson/Gimlin film. John Green’s recent article has attracted lots of attention, and deservedly so, but others, including Jeff Glickman, have previoulsy commented on the significance of limb proportions.

Meldrum hinted in his article in Bigfoot Times that his was the case. He said that "His recognition of the significance of the unhumanly long arms of the film subject is a point that has not previously been articulated in such a straightforward fashion."

I think what Green has been the first to point out is that an attempt to bend the elbow by a man in a suit would reveal any arm extension he used. In doing so, he made a rhetorical breakthrough that will put the scoftics on the defensive for the first time. Green put a cutting edge on his argument--his predecessors didn't. Scientific progress occurs when a "good case" is made. And a good case doesn't consist of good evidence alone--it also consists of good arguments.

The argument is as self-evident as saying the sky is blue. Glickman clearly stated that arm extensions could not have been employed by any erstwhile hoaxer. I think the difference is simply that we now have John Green, a well-known and respected journalist and bigfoot researcher, making the statement.

I agree with Meldrum, but mainly because Glickman's point was buried in the midst of a long monograph.

Not quite. Here's what Glickman wrote in the full version of his report.

The vital elbow-bend giveaway wasn't mentioned. If someone else came up with it before Green, let's toss a laurel his way too. But it wasn't Glickman.

Glickman (the author is not given, but I think it was him), did make one neat rhetorical breakthrough, although it appears at the end of an uncredited article called "Bigfoot--from a Physics Point of View", online at http://www.n2.net/prey/bigfoot/biology/bfphysics.htm. In it he stated that if the chance of each of the best 100 cases being a hoax or mistake were 99%, then:

Note how this finesses scoftical doctrine, which asserts (or implies) that every "anecdotal" report must be assigned a value of zero--if one believes it is "better to be scientific," anyway. Scoftics have managed to get away with this dodge so far, but the ironic outcome, if Bigfoot is proven to exist, is that the public will decide it's better NOT to be scientific. A paradoxical result: they'll have lost the war, in their desperation to win the battle. But scoftics have little or no feel for the paradoxical side of life.

My reference was to the statistical significance of the limb ratios. Green discussed limb measures as early as 1968, according to his article, and you can’t get much earlier than that, but I don’t believe he broached questions pertaining to the statistical significance of limb measures, such as the intermembral index, until recently. As you noted, Glickman did approach the film validity question from the perspective of statistical analyses.

You may well be correct in terms of the precedence of Green’s emphasis regarding Patty’s bending (naturally proportioned) arms, the obvious significance of which is that this observation in and of itself precludes all prosthetically oriented hoaxing speculations.

I personally think the joint movements are part and parcel of the arm measures and related ratios. That is, the arms look real because they move naturally, they look proportionate in themselves, and the musculature is both evident and appropriate/realistic. Unfortunately, observations such as an apparently non-human intermembral index will likely elicit the same condescendingly dismissive response from skeptics as have previous genuinely objective analytical efforts.