Mark

Did Meldrum Dump Patty? That’s the claim some have floated after Marq Evans and Tamir Ardon showed him their mystery footage in November 2024 — that he knew the truth and no longer treated the Patterson-Gimlin Film as genuine. The later record doesn’t support it. In the April 2025 Backcountry Manifesto interview — roughly five months after that session — Meldrum walks through the biomechanics of the Bluff Creek trackway and the film itself with the same analytical posture he had used for years. He refers to the subject as “Patty” without qualification. “…I’m quite confident in what I’ve described to you because you can watch it take place in the foot of Patty on the film. You can see her heel come up first and almost reach verticality. And if it was a stiff artificial foot, a rigid prosthetic, then the rest of her foot, given the orientation of the heel, would have to stick eight inches straight into the ground. But it’s not, you know. It’s just bent. It’s flexed, and that’s what we call the mid-tarsal break. … And that is the most fundamental distinction between a Sasquatch footprint and the human footprint.” That is not the language of someone who had abandoned the film or Patty herself. It is the language of someone still treating it as a usable record of real anatomy and gait. The mid-tarsal break he points to on screen is the same feature he had long argued was difficult to reconcile with a costume or a stiff artificial foot. Whatever Meldrum’s private reaction was in the moment — and the reports of discomfort about how the material was presented to him are relevant context — the subsequent public record does not support the claim that he gave up on the Patterson-Gimlin Film. He continued to analyze Patty as a genuine primate subject. The charge that he “knew the truth” and walked away from the film is difficult to square with the interview he gave afterward.