Intelligence reports during the Cold War on the so-called ‘PSI Gap’ between the U.S. and the Soviets lead to focus and funding being put into programs such as the SRI Remote Viewing project to develop various applications for weaponized psychic potentials. This followed along the same logic as intelligence reports identifying other ‘gaps’ such as the ‘Bomber Gap’, the ‘Missile Gap’, the ‘Mine Shaft Gap,’ and so on.
Each gap was looking at particular areas where the global super powers were potentially becoming unequal in terms of resource use, development and weaponization. One of these gaps that is rarely mentioned, and one where the U.S. almost fell behind in terms of R&D and application is the ‘Bigfoot Gap’.
The Bigfoot Gap is highlighted starkly in a 1973 report from Dr. Dmitri D. Donskoy, Chief of the Chair of Biomechanics at the USSR Central Institute of Physical Culture in Moscow, USSR, which looks at the biomechanical potentials found in the famed Patterson/Gimlin footage:
“As a result of repeated viewings of the walk of a two-footed creature in the 1967 “Bigfoot” footage and detailed examination of the successive stills from the footage one is given the impression of a fully spontaneous and highly efficient pattern of locomotion shown therein, with all of the particular movements combined in an integral whole, suggesting a smoothly operating and coherent system…There are certain characteristics of the creature’s walk, which are difficult to explain in words. They might be called “expressiveness of movement.”
In modern man this is sometimes seen in a sporting or labour activity where economy and accuracy of movement is vital and essential to the activity. In study this particular characteristic can be seen by an experienced observer. In “expressiveness of movement” the motor systems upon which the particular quality is dependent are perfectly adapted to the tasks which they are called upon to perform. In other words, in the case of this creature, the movements have a neat perfection which through regular use have become habitual and automatic.”(1)
This ‘biomechanical’ analysis of the Patterson-Gimlin footage is especially interesting when it’s put into the context provided by works such as Wladimir Velminski’s Homo Sovieticus Brain Waves, Mind Control, and Telepathic Destiny (MIT Press, 2017). In his book Velminski outlines some of the philosophies and technical innovations that were developed and proposed for integrating the human body within a holistic and total system – which is where Donskoy’s praise of the “expressiveness of movement” found in the Patterson-Gimlin footage comes from.
In fact we find in the very beginning of the Soviet era that the secret sought in the film is perfectly exemplified in a quote from Leon Trotsky’s 1924 publication, Literature and the Revolution:
“Man at last will begin to harmonize himself in earnest. He will make it his business to achieve beauty by giving the movement of his own limbs the utmost precision, purposefulness, and economy in his work, his walk, and his play. He will try to master first the semiconscious and then the subconscious processes in his own organism, such as breathing, the circulation of the blood, digestion, and reproduction; within necessary limits, he will try to subordinate them to the control of reason and will. Even purely physiological life will become subject to collective experiments. The human species, the coagulated homo sapiens, will once more enter into a state of radical transformation, and, in his own hands, become an object of the most complicated methods of artificial selection and psychophysical training.” (2)
So it was that Donskoy sought to discover the key to this ‘state of radical transformation‘ in 954 frames of 16mm film. Frames which caused an uproar of skepticism in the United States. A slew of U.S. scientists preferred to doubt its veracity rather than attempt to find in it some secret to winning the war against Communism. (3) Who would guess that during the height of the Cold War the very freedom of the world rested on less skeptical Soviets being unable to fully weaponize the supple movements of the alleged bigfoot filmed at Bluff Creek in 1967? Or that perhaps we wouldn’t have had to wait for the fall of the Berlin Wall for the tide to turn if the skeptical scientists in the U.S. had used a bit more imagination?!
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Footnotes:
(1) http://www.bigfoot-lives.com/html/the_second_russian_report_on_t.html
(2) http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1924/lit_revo/ch08.htm
(3) https://www.outsideonline.com/2095096/man-who-created-bigfoot