Is the Patterson film actually the smoking gun or just clever hoaxing? Let's settle this once and for all

Right, I've watched the Patterson-Gimlin film from 1967 about fifty times now, and every time I watch it I change my mind. Some viewing it looks absolutely like a real creature walking - the way the arms move, the muscle groups, the weight distribution. Other times it looks like someone in a really good suit.

The thing that gets me is the level of film-making technology in 1967. Could someone have actually made a suit convincing enough to fool us fifty years later? Or was the creature technology already so advanced that the 'suit' explanation is actually less plausible than just... there being an unknown ape?

My questions for this thread: Have any primatologists or people with special effects background actually weighed in on the biomechanics? Is the gate genuinely impossible to fake? And is there any evidence that Patterson (the filmmaker) had the technical skills and resources to pull off a hoax?

Looking for serious discussion, not 'it's definitely real' or 'it's definitely fake' - I want actual analysis.

A primatologist actually did a proper gait analysis of the Patterson film a few years back (can't remember the name but it was published somewhere academic). They concluded it was consistent with an unknown primate but didn't rule out a human in a suit. The problem is that conclusion doesn't help us - humans are primates too, so a bipedal primate could theoretically be either.

The suit explanation gets more credible if you consider that Patterson was actually looking for something specific - he had information from local sources that something was in that area. So the hoax would've had to be pretty premeditated. Possible but requires assuming he built an incredibly convincing suit in 1967 with essentially no special effects training. The logistics of that are actually interesting to work through.

What nobody talks about enough is the context. The film was shot in Northern California where there's absolutely loads of Bigfoot sightings both before and after. If it's a hoax, it's a hoax that somehow kick-started or crystallised a pattern of sightings that would've happened anyway. Or maybe the sightings are real and the film just documented one. Honestly, I think the film is less important than the broader pattern of reports.

I've read that the special effects guys in Hollywood at the time said faking that level of realistic movement would've been genuinely difficult with period technology. But that was Hollywood. A clever hoaxer wouldn't need to meet Hollywood standards - they'd just need to fool a camera that's far away. Still, the arm swing and the walk genuinely do look weird in a way that's hard to explain as human.

The best take I've seen is that the Patterson film is genuinely ambiguous and that's actually the interesting bit. We can't definitively say it's real or fake, and both explanations require some special pleading. The fact that we've got massive amounts of post-1967 sightings with consistent descriptions suggests something real might be happening. Whether this film documents it? Still unclear, and that's fine.