Monday, January 16, 2006

The Patterson/Gimlin Film-Is It Real?

Henry M.
Nearly 39 years ago, on October 20, 1967, two men, Roger Patterson and Bob Gimlin, rode out towards Bluff Creek in northwestern California. Suddenly, Patterson's horse reared, throwing him off. There was a creature squatting by the creek neither man had ever seen before, but they knew it to be a Bigfoot. Gimlin tried to maintain the horses and keep them calm while Patterson grabbed his movie camera out of his saddlebag. He squatted down and took footage of this creature as it walked across the sandbar. As it kept walking into the thicker brush, Patterson ran closer to the creature, continuing to film. The creature turned and looked at Patterson and Gimlin, revealing it to be a female, and then kept on walking towards the woods. Patterson shot 952 frames in color of this creature, 24 feet of film. Opinion was divided on the film-real creature, or brilliant hoax? Recent developments tried to cast doubt on the authenticity of the film, but have done no harm to the film. Over the years, as I have seen this piece of film on numerous documentaries. I knew this to be a real creature. Now that I know a little more about the film, I feel there is no way that it could have been hoaxed; the technology to produce such a brilliant hoax just wasn't available in 1967. Looking at the primate costumes in films today, they still look fake. This creature looks and feels real to me. The muscle movement underneath the hair is what really convinces me-well, that and the apparent hernia on the upper right thigh, which seems to me to be a detail a hoaxer would not have thought of. I am 95% convinced the film is real. I do not think that Bob Gimlin, the only living witness, was a party to a hoax (if it was a hoax). His honesty is very striking to me. If he's not telling the truth, then no one is.

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