Debunking Patterson-Gimlin

A new documentary by Marq Evans looking into the famous Patterson-Gimlin Bigfoot film has finally uncovered real evidence that the film was faked. For years, researchers have speculated that the film was probably a hoax just based on probability. The argument goes something like this: if Bigfoot is a real animal running around in the California woods, somebody would have eventually gotten some footage better than Patterson-Gimlin, but no one ever has.

Now that's not exactly evidence, but it speaks more to a clever fake than a random wilderness encounter. Gimlin was interviewed years ago and confirmed that Patterson had basically led him to the site and told him to start filming as soon as they saw the creature, so it could have been set up without his knowledge. He added that for years he had been convinced the creature was real, but admitted in his old age that he was no longer entirely sure.

Bigfoot believers point out that the Patterson-Gimlin stands up to close analysis. You can magnify it and see what look like muscles moving under the skin. The proportions are all wrong for a human in a suit, with the ratio of arm length to height falling between that of the largest humans and apes. Special effects experts reviewed it when it first came out and concluded that it would have been incredibly expensive to fake if not impossible. The stabilized version of it that was created with digital technology still looks amazing and totally believable.

In the early 2000's a Discovery Channel program tried to make their own fake Bigfoot film using the current special effects of the time. It looked terrible. The Bigfoot was too skinny and the arms were too short. Even though the fur and so forth was well done, the final version still looked way faker than the Patterson-Gimlin. They had found a big person to put in the suit, but clearly said person was not big enough. The shorter arms also fell firmly into guy-in-a-gorilla-suit territory. Believers seized on the failure of this recreation as evidence that the original film was real.

A few years earlier, in 1998, a man named Bob Heironimus publicly stated that he had worn the suit in the Patterson-Gimlin film. There were a number of inconsistencies in his account in terms of how he claimed the suit was made and differences in his actual proportions to those of the Patterson Bigfoot. He was tall but not large enough, and according to his account the arm length was extended by wearing shoulder pads. He also could kind of do the walk, but not perfectly. These differences made believers skeptical of his account, since it did not really line up with the footage. But here's what the new documentary uncovered after following up on an email from a filmmaking instructor named Teresa Brooks:

"After her father’s death,” says Evans, 43, “she’d found a canister of 16mm film that had been sealed away for over half a century. She needed help getting it developed and wondered if I might be interested in doing something with it.”

Little did Evans know what had just been handed to him and its possible connection to the famed 1967 film. But he soon learned that Brooks’ father, a man named Norm Johnson — who spent years running the film department for Seattle’s Boeing Company — was connected to Patterson and Gimlin through his brother Dave.

And it quickly became clear to Evans that Teresa’s father had developed the Patterson-Gimlin film, which immediately made headlines around the world after the footage was released in 1967.“It caught fire right away,” says Evans. “As somebody said in our film, ‘It went viral before that word even existed.’ ”

Brooks told Evans that the reason the film had been locked away in a safe is because her mother had feared that her husband might have been involved with a short movie that she was convinced was probably a hoax. “She was concerned,” says Evans, “that Norm might get in trouble for being involved with it and told him to put away [any evidence of his involvement] and never speak about it again.”

Not long after receiving Brooks’ email, Evans had the 16mm film developed and days later found himself looking at a 40-second clip set in a location similar to the one in the 1967 movie, showing what appeared to be a slightly skinnier-looking Bigfoot walking into the woods.

“It took me maybe nine months to realize what we really had,” says Evans, who was able to determine, by markings on the film, that the footage had been shot in 1966, roughly a year before the now-famous clip in the 59-second Bigfoot movie was allegedly shot. “What we eventually found out is that [this new footage] represented a trial run, a rehearsal that was never discarded.”

The skinnier-looking Bigfoot sounds exactly like the failed Discovery Channel recreation. It also matches Heironimus' slightly smaller proportions. So I would suggest that Bob Heironimus was the man wearing the suit for the trial run. He was telling the truth, his footage just wasn't the film that was eventually released. The differences in the suit description could reflect modifications made for the final film. He might not have even known for sure - the shaky original footage was quite possibly hard to distinguish from what the trial run was supposed to look like, and after all, the stabilization and deep analysis of the film wasn't done until much later.

But who was really in the suit, then? I'm convinced that part of the answer lies with the only decent recreation of the Patterson Bigfoot in the history of television. That was on two-part episode of the television series The Six Million Dollar Man that aired in 1976. While I do understand that the producers would have been looking at Patterson-Gimlin and deliberately trying to recreate it, it is quite striking how much better their version is than any subsequent re-creations, even almost thirty years later. How did they do it? They cast Andre the Giant as Bigfoot.

Andre had a type of giantism that made him about as close to the size of a Bigfoot as a human being is likely to get. In fact, his proportions are often referenced on sites analyzing Patterson-Gimlin to show that his arms are still too short. They are closer, though, than those of just about anybody else. Maybe Bob Heironimus didn't have long enough arms for shoulder pads to make the difference, but Andre probably did. There's no evidence that Andre was in California in 1967 - he started his career as a wrestler in France in 1966 and did not relocate to North America until 1971. But the look of the film does at least suggest the person in the suit had the same condition, making the special effects much easier to implement.

So to float a conspiracy theory, might Andre the Giant have secretly traveled to California around the time the film was made? If not, there couldn't have been many other people with the same kind of giantism in California at that time. If it wasn't Andre himself, the list of possible people is very short because the condition is quite rare. It seems obvious that Patterson saw the trial run, decided it was unconvincing, and concluded that he needed a bigger person. So he would have looked around for the biggest person he could find and cast them in his movie.

The other piece of this, of course, is to ask what people are seeing out in the woods when they report Bigfoot sightings. I am not part of the Skeptic crowd that keeps insisting that nobody is seeing anything and every report is a deliberate hoax. I think misidentification is most likely what's going on. Reinhold Meissner wrote a book years ago titled My Quest for the Yeti in which he concluded, after interviewing locals in their native language, that the creature they call the Yeti is a known species- the Himalayan brown bear. It walks on its hind legs more than other bears, and in the sun its tracks spread out and look like archetypal Bigfoot tracks.

People swear up down that Bigfoot sightings are not sightings of black bears, though if you map the frequency of Bigfoot sightings and the range of the black bear in the United States the two maps line up perfectly. Not everyone knows that if bears contract mange they can lose most of their fur, and bears without fur don't look funny like a lot of animals do - they look terrifying. Add in a fleeting glance through dark woods, and it seems to me you could easily get a Bigfoot sighting if the bear is standing up - say, scratching its itchy back against a tree. It could then seem to vanish completely by dropping to all fours and scampering away in the underbrush.

Mangy bears are not necessarily an exciting explanation for the Bigfoot phenomenon, but it still makes for a fascinating story. Bigfoot lore preceded the Patterson-Gimlin film and was prevalent enough that the film essentially went viral back when it was released in the late 1960's. What was it about the story that prompted such interest? For me, I found it fascinating as a child thinking about what we could learn about how the mind works from studying an entirely new sapient species. But in fact we can probably learn more by studying corvids, sapient species that evolved entirely separate from not just apes, but mammals in general.

And of course, as a magick blogger, I should point out that none of this rules out more paranormal explanations for Bigfoot sightings. Bigfoots could be spirits that only people with a certain level of psychic ability can perceive. They could be hallucinations of some sort caused by natural conditions like magnetic fields, an explanation for religious experiences that has been proposed by neuroscientist Michael Persinger. And, of course, some of them have always been hoaxes. The Patterson-Gimlin film, though, may go down in history as the most amazing Bigfoot hoax of all time.