People see what they want to see.
Not everyone. And certainly, facts can convince people to change their minds. But show the same video evidence to two different people and you may well get two very different conclusions.
Case in point: the Patterson-Gimlin film of Bigfoot out for a stroll, one of the most seen pieces of footage of all time. As the story goes—and don’t underestimate the importance of this word, “story”—two cowboys in 1967 were riding their horses in Bluff Creek, Northern California, when they happened upon the mythical apeman... or woman, as evidenced by her heavy breasts, captured by one of the cowboys’ 16-mm film camera.
In these precious seconds of grainy footage, we see the tall, furry creature walk like an Egyptian, swinging those long arms and bending its hands at the wrist, before staring straight into the camera. Was it really the famed Bigfoot or just a man in a suit?
Lives have been altered by the strength of this footage. Believers have left behind jobs and families to become full-time Bigfoot hunters, hoping to experience a similar encounter. Some of them sat at computers for months to write books on the subject, while others organized conventions to share evidence and testimonials. The authenticity of this formidable film has been hotly debated by devotees and skeptics alike, who scrutinized the shaky camera footage for any sign that validated their contention.
We skeptics often ask what it would take for someone to change their mind. The documentary Capturing Bigfoot, released widely a week ago, weighs in in a shocking fashion: it makes public secret footage, held under lock and key for decades, that showcases a literal dress rehearsal for the real thing.
Will Bigfooters believe it?
Less than meets the eye
There have always been large holes in the story of Bigfoot, held together by the straining fabric of wishful thinking. In case you have been living in a cave all your life—but not the same cave as Bigfoot, obviously—legends speak of a tall, humanoid ape creature, heretofore unknown to science, that has remained largely concealed in the mighty forests of the North American Pacific coast. He—she? they?—can also be called Sasquatch. Its Himalayan cousin is known as the Yeti or the Abominable Snowman. In fact, Bigfoot-like creatures have been reported all over the world. They are a kind of cryptid, a word that is not scientific but that is meant to encompass “hidden animals” like the Loch Ness monster, the chupacabra, and the Mongolian death worm.
To understand how a legend like Bigfoot’s could spread so easily, we have to understand two things: how stories are reshaped to fit a narrative and how easily observers can be mistaken.
Ask any Bigfooter and they will tell you that this camera-shy creature was talked about for generations by First Nations people, so it’s clearly not a modern invention! But according to Abominable Science!, a book written by skeptics Daniel Loxton and Donald R. Prothero, that’s only true if you squint really hard. These early tales, collected by a bureaucrat and teacher in 1920s British Columbia (who, by the way, created the name “Sasquatch” by anglicizing the original word from the language of the Coast Salish people), were about tall Natives with long hair who wore clothes and lived in villages in the mountains. Those who had encountered them often mentioned speaking to them.
These credible encounters with mountain people were later bastardized to fit the Bigfoot narrative. The word “hairy” for “long hair” became “hairy” as in “covered in fur.”
As for the people who claimed to have spotted a Bigfoot in the wild, it’s the same explanation we have for UFO sightings. There is a difference between what the eye sees and what the brain interprets... and clarity of mind can be influenced in a number of ways. Fatigue, alcohol, recreational drugs, anxiety—they can all shape what we think the eye briefly catches out of its corner.
As a matter of fact, even experts can be fooled! Loxton, the co-author of Abominable Science!, had been a shepherd for ten years, working in sheep vegetation management, when two of his fellow herders told him they had just seen a Sasquatch in the forest. They added they were pretty sure it was just a tall tree stump, but stumps don’t typically turn their head to follow you with their eyes.
Crucially, the three of them went back to investigate and sure enough it was just a tree stump. But had they not followed up on their sighting, this encounter would have undoubtedly grown in their mind as a richer, more credible story. All the more reason for eyewitness accounts to be interrogated. Everything we see gets interpreted by our imperfect brains, and our memories often lie to us.
Which is why, if we are to resolve this Bigfoot business, we need something more objective. How about another piece of film?
A bee in the Bigfoot bonnet
Capturing Bigfoot shines a spotlight on the people at the centre of the iconic Patterson-Gimlin film and works to untwist the strands of its creation. The believability of the grainy film has always rested on the argument that nobody but a genius could have perpetrated a hoax like this. At the time, the best gorilla suits were the domain of expensive movies, like Planet of the Apes. How could a couple of cowboys have faked their way into capturing something so realistic in the 1960s?
But one of them, Roger Patterson, is revealed to have been an artist and perfectionist in desperate need of cash. His son tells us that he once managed to enter a shed his father usually kept locked, and inside it he found fur coats from second-hand stores. Special effects whizzes may scrutinize the legendary film and claim that no one could have made a suit this good back then, but the strong film grain and shaky camerawork, as well as the creature’s distance, actually make definitive pronouncements quite difficult.
Then comes the admission from a friend of Patterson’s, a man named Bob Heironimus, that he was the one in the suit. We see a brief sequence of Heironimus, wearing ordinary clothes, practicing the Bigfoot walk by enhancing his natural, distinctive gait. He claims he was recruited to put on the suit and was supposed to have been paid $1,000 for it but never was.
The problem, though, is that there is a third man, Bob Gimlin, who was there when the Patterson-Gimlin film was shot and who insists the creature is not a man in a suit. It’s a case of “he said, he said,” with Bigfoot believers agreeing with Gimlin and skeptics siding with Heironimus.
And then, an hour and eleven minutes into the documentary, we are witness to a mic drop moment. A piece of crisp footage, locked away for decades by a film developer who was allegedly tasked by Patterson to put together the film of the encounter with Bigfoot, which reveals what appears to be an early attempt at creating the hoax, one year prior. The film stock matches, the camera model makes sense, the creature looks the same as in the Patterson-Gimlin film, and you can see what appears to be a zipper or conspicuous stitching running down the back of the ape. Heironimus swears he wasn’t in the suit for that one, and the documentary zeroes in on the man who promoted the Patterson-Gimlin film and took it on the road as the likely would-be ape here. His performance in the suit may not have been credible enough... until, a year later, Heironimus, with his swinging arms, cinched it.
A university professor and Bigfoot defender is shown this rehearsal footage, and even he has to admit it’s now a bee in his bonnet. “The convergences,” he says, “are remarkably striking and annoying.”
This is hardly the first time an X-Files-flavoured piece of evidence is shown to have been a hoax. That famous black-and-white snapshot of the Loch Ness monster—called “the surgeon’s photograph”—is an admitted fraud, and numerous stills of flying saucers have been shown to have been faked using flying discs, light bulbs, and computer imagery.
When we scrutinize the history of Bigfoot, it becomes clear that since his inception the giant ape has always been a marketing stunt.
Phoney as a three-dollar bill
In 1957, the government of British Columbia was preparing to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the province, and the council for the town of Harrison Hot Springs had an idea: why not revive the half-forgotten legend of Sasquatch and organize a hunt for the creature? This bold idea triggered international news coverage. Soon, the Sasquatch hunt brought in more tourism dollars than anything the B.C. government had ever funded to attract travellers.
Then, there was the fraud. Large footprints near Bluff Creek, California, were reported by a construction contractor, who was later revealed to have been a prankster. After he died, his family showed the large wooden feet he had strapped on to create the prints.
As for the infamous Patterson-Gimlin film, what is made clear in Capturing Bigfoot is that this is a story about money: who needed it and what they were ready to do to keep it flowing.
Prior to making the 1967 film, Roger Patterson had no steady income and didn’t want to work for anyone. He published a book on Bigfoot and engaged in mail fraud: customers would mail him a check, he would pocket the money and fail to send them a copy of the book. But that wasn’t enough: with a wife and three young children, he needed hard cash. An early attempt at a movie fizzled out when he ran out of financing, so he went hunting for Bigfoot with his friend Bob Gimlin and, wouldn’t you know it, they instantly stumbled upon the mythical creature and filmed an encounter that strangely recreates the first modern eyewitness account of the creature, as if that testimonial had been a script. (That testimonial, by a man named William Roe, is instructive, as no Bigfooter seems to have ever met him in person! Roe sent a very detailed description of what he claims to have seen to a Bigfoot enthusiast, who later admitted he had never met the man. Is this credible evidence?)
With the world-changing film in the can, Patterson turned to his brother-in-law, Al DeAtley, who bankrolled the promotion of this film in movie theatres across the United States. DeAtley is said to have made hundreds of thousands of dollars in the late 1960s from this, and he ended up buying himself a mansion worth millions.
After the death of Roger Patterson in 1972, DeAtley turned the rights of the movie to Patterson’s widow in an effort to distance himself from it. Any documentary or television show that wanted to use the footage had to pay her for the permission—Capturing Bigfoot was no exception, shelling out US$ 30,000 to play the clip in all its glory.
Motivated reasoning is a powerful force
Already, at least one Bigfoot believer has cast doubt on the “dress rehearsal” footage by invoking AI. After all, in an era where video can be conjured out of thin air by artificial intelligence, how can we trust that this latest footage is even real?
Its inspection by experts can be dismissed. The admission by a couple of people close to the Patterson-Gimlin film that it was a hoax can also be discounted. What matters first and foremost is believing: every piece of the puzzle can either be put aside or forced into place to fit the narrative.
Capturing Bigfoot reveals the dark side of an otherwise silly deception. Some Sasquatch hunters have spent decades obsessing over this myth, leaving behind careers and loved ones. Bob Gimlin was cut out of the profits generated from parading the film across the country, and he and his wife were routinely mocked for having promoted it in the first place. Most distressing of all, Roger Patterson’s own son was disowned by his mother when he expressed doubts about the veracity of the Patterson-Gimlin film, and the two didn’t speak for eight years. All of this drama over a man in a fur suit.
It’s a shame that the very real wonders of our natural world—the alien and venomous Portuguese man o’ war, the living fossil coelacanth fish, the uakari monkey that looks like an orangutan donned a red theatre mask—do not capture our imagination the way that Bigfoot does. There are genuine animals out there, hidden and wonderful, that deserve our attention.
The lesson here is that every fringe belief we have should come with the following interrogation: what would it take for us to change our mind? And when that evidence is presented to us, what will we do? Trust it or invoke special pleading to preserve our cherished belief?
Take-home message:
- The Bigfoot or Sasquatch legend states that a kind of tall, hairy ape lives in secret on the Pacific coast of North America.
- It is based on First Nations stories, which actually referred to mountain men with long hair.
- The iconic Patterson-Gimlin film claims to depict an encounter in 1967 with Bigfoot in Northern California. Bob Heironimus has since come forward and claimed he was wearing the Bigfoot suit.
- A new piece of film, shot in 1966, has just been released as part of the documentary Capturing Bigfoot, and it shows what appears to be an earlier attempt at crafting this hoax, one deemed not good enough and thus kept secret for decades.
