Real Monsters, Gruesome Critters, and Beasts from the Darkside. Brad Steiger
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it wished to avoid contact.
Some who viewed the film when Patterson and Gimlin showed it to expert woodsmen and scientists said that the creature in the filmstrip was over seven feet tall and estimated its weight at around 400 pounds. An immediate point of contention among some skeptics was how the Bigfoot walked away from the camera with a stride that appeared human. It left footprints seventeen inches long, and it had a stride of forty-one inches.
Patterson and Gimlin felt that they had at last provided the scientific community and the world at large with proof of Bigfoot’s existence. However, other Bigfoot hunters and vast numbers of skeptics declared that the two men had merely tried to pull off a clever hoax. Many concluded that the alleged Bigfoot was nothing more than a partner of Patterson’s and Gimlin’s wearing a well-crafted “apeman suit.”
Dr. Osman Hill, director of Yerkes Region Primate Research Center at Emory University, stated that if the being in the film was a hoax, the costume had been incredibly well done.
Interestingly, Dr. John R. Napier, director of the Primate Biology Program of the Smithsonian Institution, was a bit more receptive to this filmed evidence for Bigfoot. After his examination of the Patterson-Gimlin film, Dr. Napier concluded that while he saw no evidence that pointed conclusively to a hoax, he did express some reservations about the exaggerated, fluid motion of the creature as it walked away from the two men. It was also Dr. Napier’s opinion that the Bigfoot was male, in spite of the pendulous breasts, because of the crest on its head, a signature of male primates.
Dr. Osman Hill, director of Yerkes Region Primate Research Center at Emory University, stated that if the being in the film was a hoax, the costume had been incredibly well done. Dr. Hill also stated his assessment that the Bigfoot in the filmstrip was hominid (humanlike) rather than pongoid (apelike).
Some skeptics swore that the gorilla outfit had come from the costume department for the motion picture Planet of the Apes (1968). However, technicians at the Documentary Film Department at Universal Pictures, Hollywood, agreed with the scientists’ assessment and said that it would take them a couple of million dollars to duplicate the monster and its movements on the Patterson and Gimlin filmstrip. First, they stated, they would have to create a set of artificial muscles, train an actor to walk like the thing on the film, then place him in a gorilla skin.
The controversy over the film taken at Bluff Creek continued for thirty years. Then on October 19, 1997, the day before the thirtieth anniversary of the Patterson-Gimlin filming of Bigfoot and just prior to a release by the North American Science Institute announcing their analyses that the creature depicted on the film was genuine, stories appeared in the media once again claiming that John Chambers, the academy award-winning makeup genius behind such classic motion pictures as The Planet of the Apes had been responsible for creating the gorilla suit that had fooled Patterson and Gimlin and thousands of other Bigfoot believers. According to Howard Berger of Hollywood’s KNB Effects Group, it was common knowledge within the film industry that Chambers had designed the costume for friends of Patterson who wanted to play a joke on the determined Bigfoot hunter. Mike McCracken Jr., an associate of Chambers, stated his opinion that he (Chambers) was responsible for designing the gorilla suit.
Interestingly, none of the individuals who had allegedly asked John Chambers to design a gorilla costume in order to hoax Patterson ever stepped forward and identified themselves. Chambers himself, who was living in seclusion in a Los Angeles nursing home when the story of the gorilla suit hoax broke, refused to confirm or deny the reports.
Roger Patterson died in 1972, never doubting that he had caught a real Bigfoot on film and swearing to all who would listen that the incident at Bluff Creek had been no hoax perpetrated by himself or Gimlin.
Chris Murphy, a Bigfoot researcher, told the Sunday Telegraph (October 19, 1997) that “very high computer enhancements of the film show conclusively that, whatever it was, it was not wearing a suit. The skin on the creature ripples as it walks.”
Other Bigfoot experts have declared the Patterson-Gimlin film to be an authentic documentary of a genuine female hominoid. Two Russian scientists, Dmitri Bayanov and Igor Bourtsev minutely analyzed every movement of the female Bigfoot on the controversial film and concluded that it had passed all their tests and their criteria of “distinctiveness, consistency, and naturalness.”
“Who,” they ask rhetorically in their chapter in The Sasquatch and Other Unknown Hominoids, “other than God or natural selection is sufficiently conversant with anatomy and bio-mechanics to ‘design’ a body which is perfectly harmonious in terms of structure and function?”
Loren Coleman, one of the world’s most knowledgeable cryptozoologists, poses with a friend, the Cryptozoological Museum’s eight-foot-tall, 400-pound Bigfoot, created by Wisconsin taxidermy artist Curtis Christensen (photo by International Cryptozoology Museum/Joe Citro).
In 2009, an outrageous rumor about a “Bigfoot Massacre” having taken place in which Patterson and Gimlin shot and killed the female Bigfoot and her family after following her back to her home in the forest began to make the rounds of the various Bigfoot hunting clubs and groups.
It has been only within the last few years that Bob Gimlin has begun appearing at Bigfoot conferences. At one such gathering in Texas in September 2009, Gimlin and respected cryptozoologist Loren Coleman shared a number of early morning breakfasts. Together, the two men spoke of their disappointment about what had happened with the Patterson-Gimlin film after the “human element” got involved. They agreed that human personalities had, unfortunately, “mucked things up,” a sad fate that occurs to any field with strong egos and groundbreaking discoveries.
Don and Peggy Avery‘s Sasquatch experiences began as the result of an avid interest in the old gold rushes of the nineteenth century, particularly that of the Klondike, and continued sporadically for nearly 20 years. Don had read many books on the subject and had watched a number of television programs on the various techniques of prospecting. In 1989, Don and Peggy moved to eastern Washington where Don began his employment managing a small community. According to Don:
Somewhere along the line I became interested in dousing. I had carried a quartz crystal around with me for many years and I thought that I would attempt to invoke whatever ability I might have at map dousing for gold deposits. I purchased a Metsker’s map of the region and triangulated on a sand bar some 55 miles to the northeast in the Snake River below the lower Granite Dam.
Several weeks later, Peggy and I drove to the area. We had never visited this locale before, and we wandered along the beach for quite some time, distressed by the ribbons of oil that we spotted in the sand. After about an hour of wandering around feeling like a fool, it dawned on me that I was staring at black sand and not oil tainted sand. I found a rich ledge a dozen yards inland and took some samples that I panned down. The effort revealed a flash of gold in the pan.
I was hooked. I subsequently made several trips to the area and wound up with a very nice gold button that I retorted from an amalgamation of mercury and hundreds of flakes of fine gold.
I subsequently read about the Liberty mining district in the Cle Elum area. It had been discovered by a group of Blewett miners heading over the pass in an effort to resupply in Cle Elum. This gold was crystalline wire, which is extremely rare. The nuggets found at the head of the creek that drains the area that I claimed held the largest nuggets ever found in Washington State. The heftiest of which was about 6 1/2 pounds. The miners lost the trail of this ancient deposit as the result of a basalt intrusion.
But logic dictated that a 6.5-pound nugget, shaped like a wing, would not tumble far from its source.
I hit upon a spot on a bench above the creek through dousing and soil sampling. I filed a mining claim in the summer of 1995