(Group) North America Science Institute
The North American Science Institute (NASI), now defunct, was an Oregon-based organization dedicated to aggressively addressing the question of the existence of the sasquatch. Jeff Glickman served as the executive director. Glickman was a certified forensic examiner who specialized in image enhancement and reconstruction. NASI functioned during the 1990s.
A major focus of NASI’s effort involved an unprecedented analysis of the Patterson-Gimlin film subject. Approximately $75,000 was reportedly spent in a study of the film, which involved digitally scanning a first-generation copy of the film in 1994. Describing the process, Glickman wrote:
Each of the 953 frames of the Patterson-Gimlin film were digitized three times, once each through red, green and blue filters. Each of these three colors was digitized using 12 bits (4,096 levels) at the rate of 2,656 pixels horizontally and 1,912 pixels vertically. This provided 36 bits per pixel at a digitization rate of slightly higher than 250 dots per millimeter (approximately 6,350 dots per inch) which was high enough to image the film grain. Each frame of the Patterson-Gimlin Film yielded a 30,470,144 byte Silicon Graphics (SGI) file composed of a 512 byte header followed by the pixels organized in 3 planes, one for each color. These frame data files were buffered locally on a Silicon Graphics workstation until twenty frames were accumulated which were then written to an 8mm Exabyte tape cartridge in Unix tar format. The twenty frame files were written twice to each tape to minimize the chance of a tape defect rendering a frame inaccessible.
Because the total size of the dataset is nearly 30 billion bytes (GB) of data, it was impractical in 1994 to keep all of the frames on rotating magnetic storage (hard disk). Instead, each group of twenty frames was written to a recordable CD-ROM. The full dataset is comprised of 48 CD-ROMs which provide near-line, random access to the dataset. All data transfers were performed with 100% read-after-write verification. The software used to perform the image restoration, image enhancement, and other image processing is Clarity, a proprietary image processing software package developed by Photek. Clarity was run on a specially built ALR Evolution V, IBM-compatible computer. Other software used includes Adobe Photoshop and Kodak Shoebox.
Most of the images presented were processed with either image restoration or image enhancement software. Some of the enhancement algorithms operate only on gray-scale, or result in gray-scale images after processing. The original scanned images are RGB, and gray-scale images are the Y component of the YIQ transform. The image contained on the first generation copy that was scanned resulted from the optical superposition of a Kodachrome original onto Eastman Safety stock. This is important because the dyes used in the film for the three colors are not the same size. For this reason, in some instances, the green layer of the film is processed alone because it has the smallest grain and hence captured the highest spatially-resolute image. The image restorations involved motion and focal blur removal which was performed using FIR and IIR filters. Image enhancement included Wallis enhancements, homomorphic equalization, histogram equalization and curve adjustments. Acknowledging that it would not be possible to “prove the imagery in the Patterson-Gimlin film represents an uncatalogued animal,” Glickman sought instead to try to “exclude the possibility” that the figure could be a human in a costume. Glickman found no sign of hoaxing in the film, but as stated by Dmitri Bayanov, NASI “did not broadcast the finding to the world.”
NASI published Glickman’s findings in a comprehensive report, “Toward the Resolution of the Bigfoot Phenomenon” in 1998, sometimes referred to as the "Glickman report." Many important findings in the report, if not the whole report itself, are often dismissed because of a perceived major error in Glickman's attempt to estimate the figure's mass (weight). However, Glickman couched his estimate by stating:
"The mass of all primates has been shown to be allometrically related to chest size [McMahon 1983]. Whether this equation is applicable to the subject of the Patterson-Gimlin film is open to debate. It is nonetheless interesting to note the mass estimated by this equation."
What few people realize, perhaps even Glickman, is that the equation he used is derived primarily from the morphometrics of monkeys who have long, tubular bodies with narrow chests. This equation produces specious results for gorillas and, to a lesser extent, other apes and humans. Dr. W. Henner Fahrenbach has discussed this issue in depth in his 1998 Cryptozoology paper.
