The Patterson – Gimlin Bigfoot Footage

The Holy Grail of Bigfoot tapes. For a variety of reasons, this clinches the argument over whether or not Bigfoot exists.

In 1967, Roger Patterson and Bob Gimlin left Yakima, Washington and went to Willow Creek, California. They were both cowboys and worked seasonally. Patterson had been hunting Bigfoot for a long time; in fact, he was more or less a fulltime Bigfoot hunter for half the year. He had also written a book about Bigfoot. Despite all of that, he was just a cowboy, and he was not a particularly educated man.

Patterson brought Gimlin along because he wanted the best horseman he could find, and Gimlin is one of the finest cowboys out there. They went to Willow Creek because many Bigfoot tracks had been seen in the area recently as logging roads were opening up, so they figured it was a good place to look. These tracks were first noted in 1958 by Jerry Crews, a road worker.

The family of a recently deceased man named Ray Wallace has claimed that he created the Bigfoot myth by walking around in the woods wearing wooden shoes. The family has produced the shoes. However, the tracks left by his wooden feet do not match at all to the many known Bigfoot prints on many variables.

On October 20, they went to Bluff Creek, California, near the border between Humbolt and Del Norte Counties. They were riding along a trail along Bluff Creek when they came to an uprooted tree stump as large as a room in a house. As they moved past it, they looked down in the creek bed. There had been huge storms in the spring and much of the tree cover around the stream was washed away. In order to get to the creek, animals had to move across the open creekbed to get to the water.

Both men saw the Bigfoot at once. Patterson’s “unspookable” horse spooked and flipped him off of it. Patterson struggled to pull himself from under the horse, which had fallen tot he ground, then to get his camera out of his bag. He then began running across the creekbed pursuing the Bigfoot. He got about 15-20 seconds of the finest footage anyone has ever made of a female Bigfoot, 24 feet of 16mm film with a 16mm Kodak camera.

People went back the next day and made classic Bigfoot casts of the footprints in the soil. Bigfoot footprints have been found all over and many casts have been made. They share common abnormalities that would make them hard to fake. They lack an arch, and have a bone present that is not in a human foot. There are several other ways that they are different.

Mathematical calculations based on the prints showed that “Patty” weighed 550 pounds and that she was 7 feet 6 1/2 inches tall. The prints were 14.5 inches long and 6 inches wide.

Since that time, several people have all come forward with different stories that they wore a monkey suit for the footage. Each person has a different story and some even have the suits. Some keep dragging out new suits every year, trying to make them better and better, since in general, they look nothing like the footage.

Hollywood filmmakers have said it would be difficult or impossible to make a suit like that and that probably no human could be trained to walk the way Patty walks, or if so, only with extensive training. Patty displays a completely non-human method of locomotion would be difficult, if not impossible, for a human to imitate.

Note in the footage where Patty turns to look at the camera. Note how she turns her whole upper body around, including her shoulders, not just her head. A human generally only turns their head, but apes turn their upper body around, since they can’t turn just their head. Who would have thought of that?

Note the hairy breasts. Even apes do not have hair breasts.

Movement of thigh muscles can be seen as Patty runs. This movement is perfect, exactly the way a huge thigh would move. The muscle would not be visible under a costume.

Patty has a hernia on her left thigh. A hernia would not be visible under a costume.

Notice the absolutely natural way that Patty walks in a manner of locomotion that is utterly nonhuman.

Notice how long her arms are compared to the rest of the body.

Patty’s knee operates at a completely different angle when walking than a normal human knee does – it is not fully extended. This may be an adaptation to supporting a great deal of weight.

Patty has huge shoulders, calculated at 34 inches wide. The average man has shoulders 25 inches wide. A wide shouldered man is 28-29 inches. Humans with shoulders over 30 inches are nearly unheard of. Even Andre the Giant’s specs do not match Patty’s.

In 1998, the BBC paid special effects people to make a perfect Patty costume, then had an actor run along to imitate Patty. The documentary was billed as destroying the Patterson footage once and for all. The effort failed completely. To this day, no one, not even the finest Hollywood special effects designers, has been able to use an actor and a monkey suit to recreate this footage. Keep in mind that 43 years ago, special effects was still in its infancy and it is orders of magnitude better now than it was then.

No one has been able to prove that this footage is a fake. The worst one can say about it is that it is a mystery.

Patterson died of cancer in 1972. Gimlin is still alive, but he never made a dime off the footage. Both men were of high moral caliber, which cannot be said of the numerous fakers who all said they worse the costume that day.

Here a Hollywood animator says that the footage obviously shows and unknown animal, and that footage could not possibly be faked with a  costume and actor via modern techniques.

I am a CG animator by profession. As part of my craft I have an intuitive sense of natural human movement. I animate human characters for games.

When I view the Patterson-Gimlin film, I see a mode of movement that is not human, but humanlike. The arm swing and movement of the shouler girdles are clearly that of a truly massive frame. The musculature of the creature is very thick, but not restrictive to the range of motion in the shoulder joints.

In the trapezius muscle group, the diamond shaped set of muscles that anchor the shoulders, nape of the neck and upper thoracic vertebrae, the contraction of these thick muscle sheets is visible. In the cadence of the walk, and the amount of bobbing up and down, the presence of great and compact body mass is evident.

Also the creatures knee, not reaching full extension, is certainly an adaptation to supporting great weight. A fully extended knee has poor resistance to twisting forces. In conclusion, the reality of the film subject as an uncatalogued animal is self evident.

It simply cannot be a costume, the boundaries of the human form do not even fit within the form of the creature. Furthermore, the mass of the creature is so great and carried with such poise, a man could not even be trained to carry such great weight or walk bearing weight in such a fashion.

The muscle masses, if they had been padding, would have been static and restrictive. The presence of visible muscle contraction, the freedom of movement, the cadence of the walk, all fully support the claim that the footage documents a living hominid outside of the genus of man.