What happens when the majority of people assume anything that looks like bigfoot is some person in a hairy suit and then a scientist creates a human primate or monkey chimera hybrid for the purpose of harvesting human organs and it escapes? Do game departments and law enforcement ignore all the calls? Are we allowed to capture and tame it? Would it be treated as a human or a monkey? Does it get human rights or animal rights? Do the answers change if it speaks English?
The organ harvesting purpose implies that the monkey chimera would have higher-order intelligence, right? Or are we to assume the organ harvesting is of the "rip and tear" variety as opposed to the "precision" variety?
How very sad. The monkey chimera was fluent in English, but got subdued in India.
If you look up that film stabilized [1], it becomes really apparent that it's just a guy in a ape costume. The shaky camera is the only thing that makes it harder to determine what's going on.
9 out of 10 experts agree. It's that last one. That one person is just enough for people to latch on. Then, of the 9, 6 of them get tired of yelling at clouds and quit. The 6 get replaced with those that believe the one so that there's not 7. That goes on for long enough, you get people in charge that do away with vaccinations and measles has a come back.
That's not actually how the measles thing happens.
What really happens is that the one nutter stands in the town square ranting about lizardmen and 99.99% of people ignore him, or an actual scientist gets bored and challenges him to a debate and then lizardmen guy gets trounced and further discredited, and everything is fine. Until someone with an authoritarian streak gets tired of winning debates with lizardmen guy and instead tries to shut him up, or starts suppressing data that doesn't actually support the crazy theory but is kind of inconvenient or complicated to explain.
Then you're screwed because you're letting the conspiracy guy point to an actual conspiracy to suppress his views, which provides evidentiary support for the claim that their crazy theory isn't mainstream because it's being suppressed. Meanwhile you get free speech defenders concerned about a bad precedent coming out to oppose you, and then political lines get drawn over something that never should have been partisan, but now everyone is expected to pick a side. And a lot of people end up on the side of lizardmen guy.
But once it's partisan, people are hopeless at being neutral. If you're on lizardmen guy's side then you're giving him the benefit of the doubt and on the lookout for any fault in his critics, which is how you get way too many people actually believing in lizardmen.
The problem is fundamentally that censoring something discredits you rather than them.
I think the biggest thing in question when the Patterson film is discussed is who actually made the (supposedly) Hollywood-quality ape suit.
Sounds like this doc might have a real bombshell though -
> “Capturing Bigfoot,” premiering this week at the South By Southwest film festival, builds to a big reveal: freshly surfaced film that appears to show a woodsy dress rehearsal for one of the world’s most enduring hoaxes. In the new footage—from a Kodak reel dating to 1966—Patterson’s camera tracks a man in costume, his brother-in-law, moving in a similar fashion to the figure in the 1967 shoot
This would be a pretty nice conclusion, to be honest.
Is it? Because plenty of other hoax-based bullshit, like Flat Earth Conspiracy Theorists and those who believe that the Earth is only 6,000 years old continue on in their bubbles regardless of how much evidence is provided to the contrary.
I wonder if it gets a mention? It does get a mention in the recent Bruce Campbell movie https://www.ernieandemma.com/ - which looks to be even more poignant with his recent cancer diagnosis :-(
There are more conspiracies. Here are some well-verified ones:
- Epstein and way too many important people.
- The big one from the 1970s onward to increase the return on capital by lowering living standards, the "Powell memorandum".[1] That's the founding document of the modern conservative movement.
- Facebook/Meta being behind schemes for age verification.[2]
Given that a large portion of the population has a HD or higher quality camera in their pocket most of the time these days, most cryptid style conspiracies seem pretty well debunked at this point.
Somewhat relatedly, there is a pretty plausible theory that some “find the Yeti” expeditions were in fact cover for operations by my country’s intelligence services to sabotage China. See e.g., https://topsecretumbra.substack.com/p/the-secret-history-of-...
(Btw the general idea that there are animals that we don’t know about is not remotely far-fetched. A new possum genus was discovered like a month ago.)
In a similar vein I highly recommend Behind the Curve, which is a documentary about the flat Earth movement. It was a pretty fair film and tried to get to know the people involved in the movement and what it was that motivated them.
It was interesting to see that one of the main figures featured in the documentary started out pretty generically wanting to get into conspiracy theories and started reading up on one after another until he found a particular one that clicked.
What does bigfoot have to do with conspiracy? Doesn't bigfoot qualify as folklore/urban legend/pseudoscience/hoax/mythology? Is there widespread belief the government is actively covering up its existence for some reason?
Nothing in the linked story explained it. Did someone make a whole documentary and couldn't get the most basic info right? Or did the reporter mangle the article write-up?
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How very sad. The monkey chimera was fluent in English, but got subdued in India.
If you look up that film stabilized [1], it becomes really apparent that it's just a guy in a ape costume. The shaky camera is the only thing that makes it harder to determine what's going on.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oPlRr_OfxZI
For example if one doctor says I have cancer but 100 electricians say I don't I'm cancer free
> Is the number of people high enough to make them right?
The term you are looking for is 'an argument to popularity'. It's one of many such logical fallacies.
https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Logical_fallacy
What really happens is that the one nutter stands in the town square ranting about lizardmen and 99.99% of people ignore him, or an actual scientist gets bored and challenges him to a debate and then lizardmen guy gets trounced and further discredited, and everything is fine. Until someone with an authoritarian streak gets tired of winning debates with lizardmen guy and instead tries to shut him up, or starts suppressing data that doesn't actually support the crazy theory but is kind of inconvenient or complicated to explain.
Then you're screwed because you're letting the conspiracy guy point to an actual conspiracy to suppress his views, which provides evidentiary support for the claim that their crazy theory isn't mainstream because it's being suppressed. Meanwhile you get free speech defenders concerned about a bad precedent coming out to oppose you, and then political lines get drawn over something that never should have been partisan, but now everyone is expected to pick a side. And a lot of people end up on the side of lizardmen guy.
But once it's partisan, people are hopeless at being neutral. If you're on lizardmen guy's side then you're giving him the benefit of the doubt and on the lookout for any fault in his critics, which is how you get way too many people actually believing in lizardmen.
The problem is fundamentally that censoring something discredits you rather than them.
Sounds like this doc might have a real bombshell though -
> “Capturing Bigfoot,” premiering this week at the South By Southwest film festival, builds to a big reveal: freshly surfaced film that appears to show a woodsy dress rehearsal for one of the world’s most enduring hoaxes. In the new footage—from a Kodak reel dating to 1966—Patterson’s camera tracks a man in costume, his brother-in-law, moving in a similar fashion to the figure in the 1967 shoot
This would be a pretty nice conclusion, to be honest.
I wonder if it gets a mention? It does get a mention in the recent Bruce Campbell movie https://www.ernieandemma.com/ - which looks to be even more poignant with his recent cancer diagnosis :-(
- Epstein and way too many important people.
- The big one from the 1970s onward to increase the return on capital by lowering living standards, the "Powell memorandum".[1] That's the founding document of the modern conservative movement.
- Facebook/Meta being behind schemes for age verification.[2]
[1] https://scholarlycommons.law.wlu.edu/powellmemo/
[2] https://techoversight.org/2025/07/29/bloomberg-meta-google-l...
That being said, nowadays it seems that a difference between conspiracy theory and confirmed fact is 12-24 months
(Btw the general idea that there are animals that we don’t know about is not remotely far-fetched. A new possum genus was discovered like a month ago.)
This MSN "article" seems oddly out of place on HN.
It was interesting to see that one of the main figures featured in the documentary started out pretty generically wanting to get into conspiracy theories and started reading up on one after another until he found a particular one that clicked.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Behind_the_Curve
Nothing in the linked story explained it. Did someone make a whole documentary and couldn't get the most basic info right? Or did the reporter mangle the article write-up?