Patterson-Gimlin film—genuine or the best hoax ever?

I've gone down the Patterson-Gimlin rabbit hole proper this week and I genuinely can't make up my mind. On one hand, the film is 60 years old and no one's ever successfully hoaxed it with the technology available at the time. On the other hand, people were clever and motivated.

The walking gait is the thing that gets me. Modern VFX experts have said you can't fake that smoothness with a suit and the physics involved. But other people have shown you absolutely can with the right suit design.

What's the consensus on this forum? Is this settled science or are we still genuinely undecided?

It's settled: it's a man in a suit. A very good suit, sure, but a suit. The people who "proved" it was real have strong ideological commitments to Bigfoot existing. The people who proved it was fake have to overcome the "but how could they in 1967" argument, which is actually answerable with 1960s technology.

The gait argument is nonsense. You know what has an unusual gait sometimes? Men in ape suits. The burden of proof is on the people claiming it's a real unknown primate, not on the skeptics.

Modern VFX experts have said you can't fake that smoothness with a suit

Whether the Patterson-Gimlin film is real or not, there ARE genuine unexplained sightings and track casts from before and after that film. The film itself might be a hoax, but that doesn't invalidate everything else.

I think the most honest answer is: we don't know for certain, but the probability it's a suit is higher than the probability it's an unknown primate species living undocumented in North America. Both are possible. One is more likely.

This is where the forum needs to be better. We treat "possibly real" and "probably real" as the same thing. They're not. The Patterson-Gimlin film is probably a hoax. That's different from definitely being a hoax. That's different from being definitely real.