Q: If the famous Patterson/Gimlin Bigfoot film is fake, as skeptics say, then why hasn’t anyone been able to duplicate it?
—M. Morrow
A: I’ve heard some version of this question dozens of times during my career as a monster investigator. I have investigated the best photographic evidence for several mysterious creatures—most prominently the 1977 photograph of the lake monster Champ, as seen the articles Joe Nickell and I wrote in the July/August 2003 issue of this magazine and our book Lake Monster Mysteries. However, I hadn’t yet done an in-depth investigation into the famous 1967 footage taken in Bluff Creek, California, by Roger Patterson and Bob Gimlin.
The Patterson and Gimlin film has been the subject of controversy and debate for half a century and is routinely cited as the gold standard for Bigfoot footage (even some fifty-five years later, which is deeply suspicious given the ubiquity of high-quality smartphone cameras since then). Though the footage is blurry, one thing is clear: it’s either a hoax or a Bigfoot. Skeptics have offered damning analyses, both of Patterson and the murky circumstances under which the film was created and developed; see, for example, Greg Long’s The Making of Bigfoot and Daniel Loxton and Donald Prothero’s Abominable Science. Bigfoot believers offer a variety of responses, many of which wrongly place the burden of proof on skeptics, such as “If it’s a guy in a suit, where is the suit?” and “If it’s faked, why can’t anyone recreate the film using materials available in 1967?”
The alleged failure of the film to be recreated by researchers has long been a popular talking point among Bigfoot believers. A few examples will suffice. A fellow named Scott Renchin, in replying to a Skeptoid YouTube video about the Patterson and Gimlin film, wrote in January 2022 that “A real skeptic would prove the film is a hoax by recreating the film using techniques and materials used to create the alleged hoax footage. … The BBC did this already and failed miserably.” I was also directed to this same BBC show by noted cryptozoologist Ken Gerhard and others.
Film Replication Claims
The literature on this just-under-one-minute film is both voluminous and contentious, and there’s a lot to unpack. I’ll begin by noting that my focus is neither on Bigfoot’s existence generally nor the authenticity of the film specifically. Over and over when seeking information on this topic, respondents invariably go off topic and dive into why the film is obviously a hoax—or just as obviously authentic. Instead, my topic is very specific and simple: Who, specifically, has actually tried to replicate the film itself, using what equipment, and when? What documentation do we have of sincere, dedicated efforts by knowledgeable experts to create footage that matches the Patterson and Gimlin image?
Researchers have tried to recreate the movement of the subject in the film. My colleague Dave Daegling, for example, conducted a detailed analysis of the Patterson and Gimlin film in his book Bigfoot Exposed and explored the question of whether a human could walk like the creature in the film. He determined that the creature’s size and speed are well within human limitations, so it is certainly possible for a person to walk the way the film’s subject does using what’s called a compliant gait. It’s not the most comfortable method of locomotion for a human, but it’s easy to adopt with a bit of practice. Therefore, the locomotion of the subject doesn’t rule out a person in a suit.1
Instead, the question is about replication of the film itself, which is a far more challenging and expensive task and would require not only the original equipment but a reasonably similar costume, gait, location, environment, and so on.
Where’s Bigfoot (Recreations)?
Alleged films trying to replicate the Patterson and Gimlin footage turned out to be nearly as elusive as Bigfoot itself. I found a handful of videos of television shows attempting (usually lightheartedly) to make their own Bigfoot films, while not making any serious attempt to replicate the Patterson and Gimlin film per se. For example, the show Evening Magazine described their half-baked, tongue-in-cheek stab at it: “We wondered what it would look like if we tried to make a Bigfoot film of our own. … We picked up a gorilla suit at Champion Party Supply and made no modifications to it. We used a 16 mm film camera, roughly like the one Patterson used” (“Bigfoot or Big-Phoney” 2005).
In questioning Bigfoot proponents, I was often assured that many (or at least “several”) attempts had been made to replicate the film. When pressed to name one, the BBC show was prominently mentioned (often accompanied by chiding about how I should do better research). Searching for something more substantive and scientific, I reached out to Daniel Perez, a respected Bigfoot researcher and publisher of the Bigfoot Times newsletter, to ask if he was aware of any attempts to replicate the film. He kindly provided a list of references to material about the film (Perez 2022). Of those, about a half dozen were television shows, and of those only two mentioned any replication or recreation. The first was a 2007 Discovery Channel show titled Best Evidence: Bigfoot, which Perez notes “covers the attempted replication of the movements seen in the [Patterson and Gimlin] film” (emphasis added). As noted, this is not the question at hand, and in any event if anything it casts doubt on the film’s authenticity.
The second was to a 1998 BBC show titled The X-Creatures: Shooting The Bigfoot (available on YouTube under the title The X Creatures Bigfoot and Yeti). Of this episode, Perez notes that “The show attempts to recreate the [Patterson and Gimlin] film but certainly appears to fail miserably.” I reviewed the episode a dozen times, and here’s exactly how the narrator describes the attempt (at the twenty-minute mark): “Using the same distances recorded at Bluff Creek, the same camera and lens, and an amateur operator, it’s possible to exactly recreate the action of 1967.” The show at no point claims to recreate the Patterson and Gimlin film itself; instead, it’s an attempt at recreating the action depicted in the film, which is a very different matter. Accident and crime reconstruction analysts recreate actions all the time, using anything from toy cars to computer animation. It’s a fairly straightforward process that does not require replicating all the relevant conditions at play when an event occurred. Even when an accident or crime is recorded on video, the investigators need not recreate the video itself. They need only to recreate the actions of the people and objects seen in the video.
The goal of the X-Creatures show was to determine how plausible Patterson and Gimlin’s claims are using only two criteria: the reported distance and the original camera and lens. That’s it. The show makes this crystal clear: “The most important revelation … is how close Roger and Bob were to the creature; they were right on top of it, which makes the behavior even less natural. It walked away, utterly unconcerned. … At this distance, with this lens, you’re certain to get the creature in the frame—unless you artificially wobble the camera.”
There was no attempt at replicating the original film. Nor, for that matter, was there any attempt at duplicating the costume, which would be necessary for recreating the film. We can plainly see that the hair color is wrong, the hair length is wrong, the size is wrong, the musculature is wrong, and the feet they used look nothing like what could possibly have made the tracks allegedly found at the site. The angle to the creature is wrong, the terrain is wrong, and so on.
I still have not found a single film or video attempt at recreating the Patterson and Gimlin film using period equipment, the correct location, a credible costume, and other important criteria. Defenders of the Patterson and Gimlin film can’t have it both ways—disingenuously arguing on one hand that this BBC show was the best filmmaking expertise made to replicate the film while smugly noting that it was an obvious failure, because it looks nothing like the original.
With Bigfoot proponents unable to identify a single attempted film recreation, I tried a different approach. I reached out to Craig Scott Lamb, a filmmaker, film historian, and administrator of the Ape Suit Cinema, a Facebook group dedicated to filmed ape costumes. Lamb replied, “I know of no actual attempts by special FX professionals to replicate what was seen in the Patterson film. However, considering the cost of a pro ape suit, I can certainly understand the lack of motivation. … In other words, who’s going to foot the bill?”
Lamb’s question is as enlightening as his answer: No special effects experts he’s aware of have even tried to replicate the Patterson and Gimlin costume—much less in service of a failed attempt to replicate the film itself. He’s exactly correct about one of the key impediments to replication—expense—which I’ll discuss in my next column. Whether the Patterson and Gimlin film is real or not, the fact that no one has tried to replicate it is irrelevant to its authenticity.
Note
- It was certainly possible to create a realistic costume like that seen in the film in 1967. Planet of the Apes, for example, was released the following year, albeit with the help of professional makeup and costumes. Those resources would not have been available to Patterson and Gimlin, though Planet of the Apes required close-ups of the actors, including faces in sharp focus, whereas the Patterson and Gimlin footage is at a great distance, out of focus, blurry, and unstable—all factors that (intentionally or otherwise) thwart analysis and facilitate fakery.
References
Bigfoot or big-phoney. 2005. Evening Magazine (March 15). Available online at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XKLbaprBqPM&t=103s.
Perez, Daniel. 2022. P-G film bibliography. The Bigfoot Times newsletter.