Bigfoot's Patterson-Gimlin Film

On 20 October 1967, on a gravel sandbar beside Bluff Creek in the mountains of northern California, Roger Patterson and Bob Gimlin filmed roughly a minute of a large, dark, upright figure walking away from them. The figure is covered in hair, swings its long arms, and at one moment turns its whole upper body to look back over its right shoulder at the camera before continuing into the trees. That backward glance, preserved in what enthusiasts number as frame 352, is one of the most reproduced images in the history of the unexplained. Almost sixty years later it remains the single best piece of evidence that a large unknown primate walks the forests of North America.

Most writing about the film rushes to a verdict. It is more useful to do the harder thing first: to build the strongest honest case that the footage is genuine, the way a good advocate would, and only then to walk that case slowly towards the places where it strains. The charity is the whole point. People who believe in the creature on that sandbar are not, for the most part, credulous or stupid, and the reasons they give are better than outsiders assume.

The best case, stated plainly

Start with the gait. The figure does not stride the way a person striding does. It walks with a pronounced bend in the knee that persists through the step, a rolling, flexed motion that anatomists call a compliant gait, and the hips and shoulders rotate in a way that looks continuous and muscular rather than costumed. Jeff Meldrum, an anatomist at Idaho State University who studies primate locomotion, has argued for years that this bent-knee walk is difficult for a human to sustain convincingly and would have been very hard to fake deliberately in 1967 without the biomechanical understanding to know it was even a target.

Then the body. The creature in the film has arms noticeably longer in proportion to its legs than a human’s, an intermembral index closer to a great ape’s, and analysts who have measured the frames put its height well above six feet and its bulk far beyond a person in a loose costume. There is visible movement of what look like muscle masses under the surface as it walks, and the figure appears to have breasts, suggesting a female and an attention to anatomy that a cheap gorilla suit would not bother with. Bill Munns, a Hollywood costume and effects veteran, spent years analysing the film and concluded that the proportions and the way the covering moves are extremely hard to reconcile with any suit technology available at the time.

Add the circumstances. Patterson was a rodeo rider and small-time enthusiast with almost no money, working with a rented 16mm camera in a remote creek bed. He had none of the resources of a film studio. The suit that would win an Academy Award for Planet of the Apes was being built by the makeup artist John Chambers in the same period, using budgets and expertise Patterson could not have dreamed of, and even that landmark work looks like an actor in makeup. For a broke horseman to have out-engineered a major studio, on his own, without leaving a trace of the workshop, is a genuinely large thing to swallow. And in nearly sixty years, despite enormous incentive, no one has produced a costume and a performer that reproduces the film to everyone’s satisfaction. That is the case at its strongest, and it is not nothing.

The first seam: the ground it was filmed on

Now follow it to the edges, gently, because each thread is worth understanding on its own. The first concerns where the film was made. Bluff Creek was already the beating heart of the Bigfoot story, hardly a random stretch of wilderness, and it had been made so partly by fraud. In 1958 a construction site along Bluff Creek produced enormous humanlike footprints, and a newspaper coined the word “Bigfoot” to describe whatever made them. After the road-builder Ray Wallace died in 2002, his family came forward with the carved wooden feet he had used to stamp those original 1958 tracks, and stated plainly that he had faked them. The place Patterson chose to look for the creature was famous precisely because a hoaxer had seeded it, and Patterson knew the reputation of the ground before he drove there.

Patterson’s own history matters here too. He was not a neutral cameraman who stumbled onto a monster. He had published a self-illustrated book about Bigfoot in 1966, the year before, and one of his drawings shows a hairy figure in a pose strikingly close to the creature he would later film, right down to the over-the-shoulder look. He had told people he intended to make a film about the creature. He had a documented pattern of unpaid debts, and the camera he used was rented and, according to the rental company, not returned as agreed. None of this proves anything about the figure on the sandbar, but it establishes motive, intent and a mind already holding the exact image the film would deliver.

The second seam: the men who said they made it

The strongest challenge is testimonial. Two people have claimed direct involvement in a hoax. Bob Heironimus, a Yakima acquaintance of Patterson’s, stated that he was the man inside the suit, described the costume and the day, and said he was promised money he never received. Philip Morris, a North Carolina costume manufacturer, said that he had sold Patterson a gorilla suit by mail order around that time and later coached him on how to modify it to look more convincing. These accounts do not perfectly agree with each other on every detail, which believers rightly point out, and neither man produced the actual suit. But two independent confessions, from a claimed wearer and a claimed supplier, are exactly the kind of evidence that surfaced decades late in other famous cases, and they cannot be waved away simply because they are inconvenient.

The biomechanical case, meanwhile, is more contested inside science than the film’s defenders allow. Meldrum is a credentialled specialist, but he is close to a minority of one among anatomists in reading the gait as impossible to fake; other researchers who have examined the same frames find the walk well within the range of a tall person deliberately flexing the knees, and note that the film’s low frame rate and camera shake make precise measurement of height and stride genuinely uncertain. The disputed part of the science is disputed on both sides, and the figure of six-and-a-half feet or seven feet depends on assumptions about the camera speed that were never pinned down at the time.

The third seam: everything that never turned up

Then there is the silence around the film. In the decades since 1967, the forests of North America have filled with hunters, hikers, loggers, wildlife cameras, thermal drones and mobile phones, and the creature has produced no body, no bones, no roadkill, no set of teeth, no clean high-resolution footage that surpasses a single minute of shaky 16mm from before the Moon landings. A breeding population of large primates leaves remains; a species leaves fossils and genetic traces. Environmental sampling of forests and lakes has not turned up an unknown ape. The best evidence has not improved in the age when everyone carries a camera, and that stasis is itself a kind of evidence about what is really out there.

Weigh the seams together and the honest position is a strong lean rather than certainty in either direction. The film sits on famously salted ground, was made by a man who had drawn its central image in advance and had every motive to produce it, is claimed by two men as a costume, rests on biomechanics that specialists dispute, and has been followed by sixty years in which the creature it depicts declined to leave any harder trace. Each thread alone could be argued; together they pull one way.

The day, the tracks and the frame rate

The circumstances of the filming are worth laying out, because they contain both the case’s texture and some of its problems. By the accounts of the two men, they were riding on horseback up the creek when the horses caught the creature’s scent and shied; Patterson was thrown or dismounted in a hurry, grabbed the camera from his saddlebag and ran forward on foot, which is why the opening seconds are a jerking blur of gravel and legs before the figure steadies in frame. Gimlin sat back on his horse with a rifle and, he has always said, declined to shoot because they had agreed not to kill the animal. Gimlin, unlike Patterson, is still alive, has been interviewed for decades, and has largely maintained that the encounter was real while conceding late in life that he can no longer be entirely certain he was not deceived by his own partner.

At the site the men made plaster casts of the footprints the figure left in the sandbar, and those casts became a second strand of evidence in their own right. The anthropologist Grover Krantz and, later, Jeff Meldrum argued that the casts show a flexible mid-foot — a so-called midtarsal break absent in the rigid human foot — and faint dermal ridges of the kind found on primate skin, features they considered too subtle to fake. Sceptics counter that casting artefacts and the porous creek sand can produce exactly such textures, and that the man who claimed to have salted the region, Ray Wallace, had been carving convincing feet for years.

Even the film’s most basic measurement is unresolved. Patterson could not remember, or never knew, the speed at which the camera had been running, and the estimate of the creature’s height swings between roughly six and seven and a half feet depending on whether the footage is read as sixteen, eighteen or twenty-four frames per second. Every dramatic figure quoted for the creature’s size therefore rests on an assumption no one recorded on the day. The rights to the film passed to the collector René Dahinden and have been fought over ever since, which has kept a commercial incentive alive to defend its authenticity long after its makers left the scene.

Why the sandbar still holds us

What is worth sitting with is why the film keeps its grip even on people who have read all of this. Frame 352 is a genuinely arresting image. The backward glance gives the figure interiority — it seems to know it is seen, to weigh the watcher, and then to choose to leave. That single gesture converts a shape in the trees into a mind, and a mind in the wilderness is one of the oldest and most powerful things a story can offer. The film works on the same nerve as every account of something watching from the treeline, the sense that the woods are not empty and that we are not always the observers.

There is dignity in that wish. Bigfoot is a way of insisting that the continent still has an interior, that the surveyed and satellite-mapped world keeps one large wild secret walking just out of focus. The believers on that sandbar are holding a door open to a wilder North America, and they defend the film so fiercely because it is the clearest glimpse they have of what is on the other side of the door. Understanding the footage means understanding that longing, which is why a minute of grainy film has outlived its maker and will very likely outlive the arguments about it.

For more on the tracks and myths that make up the wider creature, see Bigfoot and the footprint that walked into America, the Yeti’s footprints and a Himalayan bear, Florida’s skunk ape and the Australian yowie.