Patterson Gimlin Film A Hoax?

tell you how much I appreciate that support. If you're not signed up yet, you can do it right now by going to our website Paranormalworldproductions dot com.

with you here right now. Life has a way of pulling you in a dozen directions at once, and between producing episodes across all the shows, finishing manuscripts, and juggling the day to day demands of running Paranormal World Productions, I let the newsletter slip further down the list than I should have. For that, I owe you an apology. You're the community that keeps all of this going, and you deserve to hear from me more often. So here I am back at the keyboard, and I've got something

to say quite a lot. Actually, if you've been anywhere near the Bigfoot community in the last couple of weeks, and I suspect most of you have, given that you're listening to this, you already know that something big happened.

At the south By Southwest Film Festival on March twelfth, twenty twenty six, a documentary called Capturing Bigfoot, directed by Mark Evans, premiered in the Documentary Spotlight section, and within hours the shockwaves were rolling through every Bigfoot form, Facebook group,

podcast feed, and conference chat on the planet. The film makes the case, with what many are calling newly discovered physical evidence, that the legendary Patterson Gimlin film, the single most famous and most scrutinized piece of Bigfoot footage in existence, was a deliberate hoax, and the confession at the center of it doesn't come from some random attention seeker or bitter rival. It comes from Clint Patterson, the youngest son

of Roger Patterson himself. I've spent the better part of the last two weeks absorbing everything I can find about this film. I've read every review, every analysis, every hot take. I've listened to interviews with the director. I followed the community reaction in real time. I've also done something that I think more people in this community should be doing

right now. I've picked up the phone. I've reached out directly to the people involved, the people who have seen the documentary, who have spent their lives studying the Patterson Gimlin film. I'm going to share what I've learned from those conversations with you today because I think you deserve more than secondhand speculation. You deserve the closest thing to the full picture that I can give you right now. But before I get into any of that, I want

to be crystal clear about something right up front. I have not seen Capturing Bigfoot. As of this writing, the documentary has only screened at SXSW and is not yet widely available for public viewing. Everything I'm about to describe regarding the documentary's content comes from published reviews, interviews with the director, the film's Wikipedia entry, detailed analyzes posted by people who were in the audience in Austin, and my own direct conversations with individuals who have seen the film

or have intimate knowledge of its subject matter. I am not going to sit here and make a determination about the authenticity or inauthenticity of the Patterson Gimlin film based on second hand and accounts of a documentary I haven't watched. That's not how I operate, and it shouldn't be how any of us operate. I have reached out to director Mark Evans, and I'm currently in the process of trying

to secure an interview with him. I'm also working on getting an advanced copy of the film so that I can view it in its entirety before that interview takes place. I want to sit down with Evans, having already examined the evidence with my own eyes, and ask the hard questions that I think need to be asked. I don't know yet whether that interview will happen, but I'm pursuing it, and if it comes together, you'll hear about it on

the show. Until I've had the chance to evaluate the evidence firsthand, I'm going to report what's being claimed, put it in context, share the insights I've gathered from people I trust, and encourage every single one of you to do the same thing I'm doing withhold final judgment until you've had the chance to evaluate the evidence for yourself. Now, let me start with the backstory, because if you're going to understand why capturing Bigfoot hit the community like a

freight train. You need to understand just how much weight the Patterson Gimlin film has carried for nearly six decades. On October twentieth, nineteen sixty seven, Roger Patterson and his friend Bob Gimlin rode on horseback into a remote area near Bluff Creek in the Six Rivers National Forest in northern California. Patterson had rented a sixteen millimeter Kodak camera and had been working on a docudrama about a group

of cowboys tracking Bigfoot through the wilderness. The storyline called for Patterson, his Indian guide Gimlin in a wig, and a group of cowboys to recall various Bigfoot encounters and flashbacks as they tracked the beast on horseback. Patterson had used at least nine volunteer acquaintances, including Gimlin and a local man named Bob Hieronymus, for three days of shooting

earlier that year, possibly over the Memorial Day weekend. The official story, the one that entered the public consciousness and never left, was that Patterson and Gimlin rounded a bend in a dry creek bed and came face to face with a large, bipedal, hair covered creature walking along a sandbar. Patterson's horse reared, he scrambled off, grabbed his camera, and

ran toward the figure while the film rolled. What he captured was fifty nine seconds of shaky but mesmerizing footage showing the creature later nicknamed Patty, walking with a distinctive fluid gait, swinging its arms, and at one unforgettable moment, turning to look back over its shoulder directly at the camera. That single frame, known as frame three point fifty two, became one of the most iconic and debated images in American popular culture. It launched an industry, It defined a

field of research for believers. It was the holy grail for skeptics. It was the most successful amateur hoax ever pulled off. For nearly sixty years, that footage has functioned as the single most important and most polarizing artifact in

the history of cryptozoology. Nothing else comes close. Not the surgeon's photograph of the loch Ness Monster, which was exposed as a hoax decades ago, Not the Mayaca skunk epe photographs from Florida, not the thermal imaging footage from various television productions.

with fans who treated him like a rock star. Higher cottage industry, a media subdivision, really sprouted from those fifty nine seconds of shaky coda chrome footage. The film has generated millions of dollars in licensing fees over the decades. The Wall Street Journal reported that director Mark Evans paid thirty thousand dollars in licensing fees just to use Roger Patterson's footage in his documentary thirty thousand dollars for a piece of film shot by a rodeo cowboy in the

woods almost sixty years ago. That should tell you everything you need to know about the financial ecosystem that grew up around this footage and the stakes involved in either defending or debunking it. The film has been analyzed, enhanced, debated, and dissected by everyone from Hollywood special effects artists to

university anatomy professors. Jeffrey Meldrum, the late professor of anatomy and anthropology at Idaho State University, spent years arguing that the creature's musculature, gait, and proportions were consistent with a real biological entity and not a man in a costume. His students, he said, could identify specific muscle groups, the trapezius, the deltoid, the erector spine running down the back, the

quadruceps contracting at the appropriate moments during locomotion. Bill Munns, a Hollywood make up and visual effects specialist with thirty five years of experience building creatures for films, museums, and wildlife exhibits, conducted extensive analysis and concluded that the technology to create such a convincing suit simply did not exist. In nineteen sixty seven, Muns co authored a peer reviewed paper with Mildrum arguing that the film subject was consistent

with real anatomy and not a fabricated costume. On the other side of the Ledger, costume maker Philip Morris came forward, claiming he sold Patterson a standard guerrilla suit for four hundred and thirty five dollars from his North Carolina shop and provided instructions on how to modify it, extending the arms, broadening the shoulders, adding breasts, and concealing the zipper by

combing down the synthetic dinal fur with a brush. Morris's wife confirmed that Patterson called back, requesting extra gorilla fur and asking how to fix the eye holes so that the white skin of the person inside wouldn't be visible, and a Yakama man named Bob Hieronimus claimed publicly in two thousand and four in Greg Long's book The Making of Bigfoot, that he was the man inside the suit.

Hieronymus said he'd been recruited by Gimlin and Patterson in the summer of nineteen sixty seven, promised one thousand dollars. He was never paid and had kept quiet for decades out of a mixture of hope for eventual payment and fear of legal consequences. His mother, Opal said she found what she initially thought was a dead animal in the trunk of her car the morning after her son returned from the filming, only to realize upon closer inspection that

it was some kind of animal suit or costume. Several Yakama locals corroborated various elements of Hyeronymus's account, and some friends said that recognized his distinctive walk in the Patterson footage.

The community largely rejected hieronymous claims. Believers pointed out contradictions in his story, inconsistencies between his description of the suit and Morris's description, and the fact that when National Geographic sponsored a recreation in two thousand and four using Morris's suit with Hieronymous inside it, the result was so unconvincing that even the show's own narrator acknowledged the failure. The

proportions were wrong, the movement was wrong. The suit looked nothing like what appeared in the nineteen sixty seven film. Gimlin publicly denied involvement in any hoax. Patricia Patterson Roger's

Widow maintained the film was authentic. Believers pointed to the creature's apparent muscle movement beneath the skin, the proportional differences between its limbs and a human skeleton, the mid tarsal brake visible in the foot as it lifted off the ground, and the overall level of detail as things that couldn't

be faked with nineteen sixty seven technology. The debate ground on year after year, decade after decade, with no definitive resolution, The PG film became the single most studied piece of amateur footage in history, with the possible exception of the Zapruder film of the Kennedy assassination. And much like the Zapruder film, the closer people looked, the more they found to argue about. Until now or so, the makers of Capturing Bigfoot would have you believe, here's what is being reported.

In June of twenty twenty four, Mark Evans, a documentary filmmaker who teaches at Olympic College in Washington State, received an email from a colleague named Teresa Brooks. Brooks was a part time instructor at the same college. Her father, a man named Norm Johnson, had recently passed away. Johnson had spent years running a film lab for Boeing in Seattle, and he had been connected to Patterson and Gimlin through

his brother Dave. After Johnson's death, Foks found a canister of sixteen millimeter film that had been sealed inside a locked safe in her father's possession. Her mother had insisted that the film be hidden away, apparently because she feared that her husband's connection to what she believed was a hoax could get him into legal trouble. Johnson's wife told him to put it away and never speak about it again. The film had sat in that safe for over half

a century. Brooks brought the canister to Evans, who had it developed. What he found was a forty second clip shot on Coda Chrome's sixteen millimeter film stock, showing what appears to be a figure in a bigfoot costume walking through a wooded area that bears a striking resemblance to

the landscape scene in the nineteen sixty seven footage. The figure, according to those who have seen the documentary, appears slightly thinner and less polished than Patty from the Patterson Gimlin film, leading Evans and others to interpret it as a practice run, a dress rehearsal filmed in nineteen sixty six, a full year before the famous Bluff Creek footage was sh stay tuned for mor sasquatch Ott to see We'll be right

back after these messages. The logic is straightforward. If the PG film was a genuine chance encounter with a real creature, there shouldn't be rehearsal footage. You don't rehearse a documentary. You don't do a dry run of a chance encounter. As Folklore's Ben Radford put it in his analysis for Skeptical Inquirer, documentaries shouldn't have rehearsals. Evans recognized immediately what he believed he was looking at and began the work

of building a documentary around it. He reached out to Clint Patterson, Roger's son, who was sixty six years old at the time. Evans expected the family to shut him down, as they had shut down every previous attempt to discuss the film's origins, but Clint surprised him. It turned out that Clint had learned what he says is the truth from his own mother roughly ten years earlier. Patricia Patterson after decades of publicly defending the film, had privately told

her son that the footage was staged. The weight of that knowledge had been crushing Clint for years. He'd been contemplating writing a tell all book when Evans approached him. Instead of turning the filmmaker away, Clint agreed to speak on camera. What Clint revealed in Capturing Bigfoot is, if accurate, significant. According to the documentary, Clint stated that his father orchestrated

the hoax with the help of Gimlin and Hieronymous. He described his father as a complex man, charismatic, creative, deeply driven, and also, in Clint's own words, a liar. Roger Patterson had been a rodeo writer, an amateur boxer, a self published author, and a relentless self promoter who saw in the Bigfoot phenomenon an opportunity to make something of himself.

He had a documented history of financial problems and what some have characterized as a pattern of theft of services, running up long distance charges on a neighbour's phone, borrowing a whipment and money with no intention of returning either, none of which proves the film was faked, but it paints a picture of a man for whom a lucrative

hoax would not have been out of character. Clint told Evans that he actually watched his father burn what he says was the Bigfoot suit behind the family house one night, feeding it piece by piece into a barrel fire over the course of about thirty minutes. That detail, if true, would explain why no one has ever been able to produce the original costume, the single piece of physical evidence

that would have settled the debate decades ago. The documentary also captures a remarkable scene filmed at a twenty twenty four Bigfoot event. Clint and Hieronymus attended together and waited in line to speak with Bob Gimlin, who at this point was in his nineties and had become a beloved fixture at Bigfoot conferences across the country. They told Gimblin they wanted to finally come clean, to tell the truth publicly together, and according to the film, Gimlin initially agreed.

He was willing to go on camera and reveal the hoax, but Gimlin's wife intervened and stopped it from happening. Evans reportedly captured the entire exchange on film. The implication, at least as the documentary presents it is noteworthy. If Gimblin truly believed the footage showed a real creature, why would he initially agree to confess to a hoax. That's a question worth sitting with, even if it's not necessarily conclusive

on its own. The documentary also features interviews with Yakama locals who knew Patterson and Gimlin in the nineteen sixties, many of them now in their eighties, and many of whom corroborate various elements of the hoax narrative. Greg Long, the author whose two thousand and four book laid out the case against the film in exhaustive detail, appears in the documentary as well, and the film credits Long's earlier

research and recorded interviews as foundational material. Anthropologist Jeffrey Meldrum, who passed away in late twenty twenty five, was also interviewed for the Doctors documentary, and his reaction to being shown the newly discovered footage is reportedly one of the most affecting moments in the film. According to The Hollywood Reporter's review, a visibly shaken Meldrum acknowledged that the simplest

explanation is uncomfortable to arrive at now. I said earlier that I've been picking up the phone and talking to people, and I meant it. So let me share with you what I've learned from those conversations, because I think it adds important texture to what's being reported in the mainstream press. Shortly after Capturing Bigfoot premiered, Eric Pelasios attended a screening

of the film. For those of you who don't know Eric, he's a well known figure in the Bigfoot content space and someone whose opinion carries weight with a lot of people. Eric posted a reaction video after the screening, and his conclusion was unequivocal. He walked away convinced that the Patterson Gimlin film is one hundred percent of hoax. He was

shaken by it. According to Eric, the forty second clip that serves as the docum menary centerpiece absolutely shows Bob Gimlin sitting atop his horse in the background, while the Patty suit is in the foreground being warned by someone allegedly al Diatley, Patterson's brother in law, who was walking for the camera. Eric felt that what he saw was undeniable, that it was clearly a rehearsal and that the game was over. Now, I respect Eric, I think he's sincere

in his reaction. He sat in that theater, he watched the footage on a big screen, and he came away convinced. That's his honest assessment, and he's entitled to it. But an honest reaction is not the same thing as a thorough analysis, and I think even Eric would acknowledge that there's a difference between the visceral impact of seeing something for the first time in a darkened theater and the careful, methodical work of examining that same footage frame by frame,

with the benefit of time, context, and expert consultation. It's also worth noting something about the psychology of documentary filmmaking that I think is relevant here. A good documentary director, and by all accounts, Mark Evans is a very good documentary director, controls the emotional experience of the audience. He controls the pacing, He controls the order in which information is revealed. He controls the music, the editing, the reaction shots,

the narrative framing. By the time the audience sees the forty second clip in the context of capturing Bigfoot. They've spent over an hour being led through a carefully constructed emotional journey, learning about Roger Patterson's character flaws, hearing Clint Patterson's painful testimony, watching aging cowboys wrestle with decades old grudges and broken promises. The audience is primed, They're emotionally invested, and when the clip finally appears, it lands like a hammer.

That's not manipulation in a dishonest sense. It's just good filmmaking. But it does mean that the in theater experience of seeing the footage is fundamentally different from the cold, clinical experience of examining the footage in isolation, which is how evidence should ultimately be evaluated. I posted my own live response on social media after watching Eric's reaction video. I wanted to share my initial thoughts with the community and

make clear where I stood. I wasn't going to rush to judgment, but I also wasn't going to pretend the claims being made weren't serious. That live response apparently got some attention, because shortly afterward, I got a phone call from Doug Highcheck. For those of you who might not know the name, Doug Highcheck is one of the most

respected figures in the history of bigfoot media. He's an Emmy winning filmmaker and the creator and producer of Monster Quest, the History Channel series that brought serious, investigative production values to the study of cryptid phenomena. Doug has been around this subject for a long time. He knows the players, he knows the evidence, he knows the history, and, perhaps most importantly for this particular discussion, Doug know's filmmaking. He

understands how productions work. He understands b roll. He understands test footage. He understands the difference between a dress rehearsal for a hoax and production material for a legitimate creative project. When Doug Hicheck picks up the phone to call you about something, you pay attention. Doug's take on the newly discovered footage is different from Eric pelasiosis, and I think it's an important counterpoint that deserves serious consideration.

of filming. That production would have required exactly the kind of material that this clip appears to show someone in a bigfoot suit walking through the woods, establishing shots, test footage to see how the costume looked on camera in a natural setting. If Patterson was making a movie about hunting bigfoot, he would have needed footage of a bigfoot to cut into the film. Every docu drama needs its monster shot. The existence of that footage, Doug argues, doesn't

prove that the Bluff Creek encounter was staged. It proves that Patterson was making a movie which we already knew. The question is whether the forty second clip is a rehearsal for a hoax or simply production footage for a separate creative project that happened to involve the same costume or a different costume Entirely. For that matter, I want to sit with that for a moment, because I think it's a crucial point that the mainstream coverage has entirely ignored.

We know this is not in dispute. That Roger Patterson was making a documentary about Bigfoot in nineteen sixty seven. We know he had a storyline, we know he had actors. We know he intended to include dramatic recreations of famous Bigfoot encounters as part of the film. We know he would have needed a Bigfoot costume for those recreations. None

of this is controversial. It's established historical fact. So the existence of footage showing someone in a Bigfoot suit filmed on sixteen millimeters coda chrome stock from the same era is not, by itself evidence of a hoax. It could be evidence of a hoax. It could also be evidence of a legitimate film production. The footage itself doesn't tell you which one it is. The interpretation depends entirely on context. Context that the documentary provides through one lens, but that

might look very different through another. I think Doug's argument is reasonable, and it illustrates exactly why I'm not willing to make a final determination based on reviews and reaction videos. Context matters, interpretation matters. The difference between this is rehearsal footage for a faked encounter and this is b roll footage for a documentary that was already in production is enormous and it can't be settled by watching a reaction

video on social media. It requires careful examination of the footage itself, the timeline, the chain of custody, the specific location where it was filmed, and the corroborating testimony. I also sat down and spoke with Bill Muns. If you follow the Patterson Gimlin film debate at all, you know who Bill is. He is regarded by many, and I would say fairly as the leading authority on the Patterson

Gimblin film. He has spent years conducting frame by frame analysis of the footage, examining the proportions, the fur movement, the musculature, and the overall construction of the figure in the film. He co authored a peer reviewed paper with Jeffrey Mildrum arguing that the film subject was consistent with

a real primate and not a man manufactured costume. His work includes detailed measurements demonstrating that the subject's shoulder placement, arm length relative to body size and leg proportions fall outside the range of normal human anatomy, even accounting for

padding or prosthetic extensions. He has examined the way the firm moves across the creature's back and shoulders, noting that it appears to shift in ways consistent with underlying musculature, rather than lying flat or bunching the way fabric wood on a suit. His analysis has been cited by researchers, documentarians, and journalists for over a decade. Bill is not a casual observer. He is not a hobbyist who watched the

film on YouTube and formed an opinion. He has more hours invested in studying this particular piece of film than probably anyone alive, and he has the professional credentials and practical effects and creature fabrication to back up his assessments. Bill appears in Capturing Bigfoot. He has seen the so called smoking gun footage, the forty second clip that the documentary presents as a nineteen sixty six dress rehearsal, and his conclusion is markedly different from the narrative the film

is selling. Bill believes that what the clip shows is some sort of replica film, something that could have been produced at any point after nineteen sixty seven, not necessarily before. He does not accept the documentary's framing that it represents a pre production rehearsal for the Bluff Creek footage. Now, I want to be careful here because I don't want to put words in Bill's mouth or overstate what he told me. What I can tell you is that Bill

was measured and specific in his assessment. He didn't rant, he didn't make sweeping pronouncements. He laid out his concerns methodically, the way someone with decades of forensic film analysis experience would. Bill told me that he was able to physically hold the film and examine it with a loop. He confirmed that it is indeed Coda Chrome sixteen millimeter film stock, and that the film cartridge is date stamped nineteen sixty six.

That much appears to be factual. But here's the thing, and this is an important distinction that I think is getting lost in the headlines. A date stamp on a film cartridge tells you when the film was manufactured. It does not necessarily tell you when it was exposed and shot. Film stock, particularly in the nineteen sixties and seventies, could sit on a shelf for months or even years before

being used. A cartridge manufactured in nineteen sixty six could have been loaded into a camera and shot in nineteen sixty six, or in nineteen sixty seven, or in nineteen sixty eight or later. The date stamp confirms the age of the physical medium, it does not by itself confirm

when the images on that medium were captured. You would need additional forensic analysis, chemical testing of the emulsion, examination of the process in chemistry, analysis of the environmental conditions visible in the footage to make a more definitive determination about when the film was actually exposed. Stay tuned for more sasquatch ott to see. We'll be right back after

these messages. As far as I can tell from everything I've read and from my conversation with Bill, that level of forensic analysis has not been conducted, or at least has not been publicly disclosed.

events across the country. He is, by virtually all accounts from people who have met him, a genuinely likable man, a charming old school cowboy who enjoys the company of the people who come to hear his story.

long time and was ready to set it down. Whether he's still willing to talk and what he would say if he did, I don't know, But his perspective matters. It matters to the historical record, it matters to the research community, and it matters to the thousands of people who have shaken his hand at conferences over the years and looked him in the eye and asked him if what he filmed was real. Those people deserve to hear from him directly, not through the filtered lens of a

documentary or the speculation of people on the internet. If and when I secure that interview or statement, you'll hear about it imediately. Now, I want to be fair and thorough here, because there are legitimate questions being raised on both sides of this debate, and all of them deserve airtime. On the side of the documentary's credibility, the existence of Clint Patterson's testimony is significant. This is not some distant

acquaintance or barstool gossiper claiming insider knowledge. This is the son of the man who shot the film, speaking on camera, describing specific details about the creation and destruction of the suit. His account that his mother privately confessed the hoax to him and then disowned him when he threatened to go public has the messy, painful texture of real family drama,

not manufactured controversy. The scene at the Bigfoot conference where Gimlin allegedly agreed to come clean before his wife stopped him is explosive If it played out the way it's described, and the fact that Evans reportedly captured it on camera means it's not just hearsay, it's documented. On the side of skepticism toward the documentary's claims, the chain of custody for the newly discovered film reel is not independently verified.

We are being told that Norm Johnson developed the original PG film, that he kept this additional footage locked in a safe for decades at his wife's insistence, and that his daughter found it after his death and brought it to Evans. That's a compelling story, but a compelling story is not the same thing as verified providence. Has the film stock been independently analyzed by a forensic lab to

determine when it was actually exposed? Has the location shown in the clip been definitively identified and matched to a specific site. Has anyone established through independent evidence that Patterson was filming in that location in nineteen sixty six. These are the kinds of questions that a genuine forensic investigation would answer, and based on everything I've read and heard, the documentary doesn't appear to address them in a rigorous way.

The website Northwest Bigfoot published a detailed analysis making many of these same points. They argued that the documentary provides compelling human drama but falls short as a forensic investigation. They noted that the film relies heavily on emotional testimony rather than physical proof, and that it uses several techniques common in modern revelatory documentaries withholding evidence to create mystery, framing speculation is fact through confident narration and presenting a

single interpretation while ignoring alternatives. Matt Moneymaker, founder of the Bigfoot Field Researchers organization, dismissed the documentary before it even screened, telling reporters that this sort of chicanery has been going on since at least the nineties and insisting that the

film itself debunks any attempts to debunk it. Now, you can agree or disagree with Moneymaker's approach and dismissing something sight unseen is precisely the kind of thing I'm arguing against in this newsletter, but is underlying point that the PG film has weathered previous debunking attempts and emerged with its defenders intact is historically accurate. And then there's the interpretation question that Doug Hicheck raised the b Roll theory.

If Patterson was shooting a documentary about hunting Bigfoot, and that documentary required footage of a Bigfoot creature, then test footage of someone in a suit walking through the woods is not a smoking gun. It's a production artifact. The question becomes whether this particular clip can be conclusively linked to the Bluff Creek location, the specific timeline of the alleged hoax, and the specific individuals involved in a way

that eliminates the b Roll explanation. Based on what's been publicly reported so far, I'm not convinced that threshold has been met, but I'm also not convinced it hasn't been. That's why I need to see the film. Let me also address something about the emotional dimension of this story, because I think it's getting lost in the rush to declare winners and losers, and I think it's actually one

of the most important aspect of the whole affair. Multiple reviewers have pointed out that Capturing Bigfoot is not really a debunking film. It's a human story. It's about family, about legacy, about the bonds and the rifts that this piece of film created in the lives of the people who were closest to it. Director Mark Evans, by all accounts,

did not set out to make a takedown piece. He stumbled into the story when Teresa Brooks brought him that film canister, and he followed the thread wherever it led. The result, according to those who have seen it, is less of a forensic investigation and more of an elegy. A portrait of a small town in Washington State where a sixty year old secret has been slowly eating people alive. Clint Patterson lost his father to Hodgkins lymphoma when.

about her son's need to unburden himself. That's a tragedy, Regardless of whether the PG film is real or fake, A family torn apart by a piece of film, a son carrying the weight of his father's secrets for a decade, wanting to speak the truth as he understood it, and being punished for it by his own mother. Whatever you think about the authenticity of the footage, I hope you

can recognize the human cost of this story. Bob Gimlin, now in his nineties, has spent the last twenty years of his life as a beloved elder statesman of the Bigfoot community, attending conferences, signing autographs, posing for photographs, telling the same stories over and over. He withdrew from public life for nearly three decades, starting in the late nineteen seventies, reportedly because the constant speculation about the film's authenticity had become too much for him and his.

wreckage left behind. One reviewer from The Sight Unseen Films wrote that you can't be a feeling person and walk out of the screening feeling good because too many people have been hurt. The reviewer wrote that the film's strength is that Evans doesn't paint the ending as something glorious, but allows the moment to be colored by sadness as everyone realizes what the last six decades have ultimately called lost. Now here's where I need to say something that might

surprise some of you and that might upset others. I've never staked my belief in Sasquatch on the Patterson Gimlin film, not once, not ever. Let me say that again, so it's absolutely clear my belief in the existence of Sasquatch has nothing to do with fifty nine seconds of sixteen millimeter film shot by a rodeo cowboy in northern California in nineteen sixty seven.

The phenomenon predates the film by centuries. Indigenous peoples across North America have oral traditions describing large, hair covered bipedal beings going back generations beyond count The Shameless people of British Columbia have the Sasquatch, the Lummy have the Tissimequays. The Stolo have the Sasquatch tradition, from which the English word itself derives the Hoopa have stories, the Yakama have stories.

Tribes across the continent, from the Pacific Northwest to the Great Lakes to the Deep South have traditions of large wild haircover beings that live in the forests and mountains. These are not traditions that were invented in nineteen sixty seven in response to Roger Patterson's film. These are traditions that are woven into the cultural fabric of peoples who

have lived on this land for thousands of years. Are we really prepared to dismiss all of that because a cowboy from Yakima might have put his buddy in a guerrilla suit. European settlers reported encounters with similar creatures long

before Roger Patterson was born. The Ape Canyon incident happened in nineteen twenty four, more than forty years before the PG film existed, when a group of miners in Washington State reported being attacked by a group of large ape like creatures that hurled rocks at their cabin through the night. Albert Osman's alleged abduction story dates to nineteen twenty four as well. William Rose detailed encounter report from British Columbia. One of the most carefully documented early accounts was filed

as a sworn affidavit in the nineteen fifties. Fifty eight Bluff Creek track discoveries, which notably occurred at the same general location where Patterson would later film his footage, put the word bigfoot into the American vocabulary nearly a decade before the PG film existed. Yes, some of those nineteen fifty eight tracks were later attributed to Ray Wallace's pranking, but not all of them, and the sighting reports from

the area predated Wallace's involvement. Thousands upon thousands of sighting reports have been collected from every corner of the North American continent, from the deep forests of the Pacific Northwest to the swamps of Florida to the hollers of Appalachia to the vast wilderness of northern Canada. The Bigfoot Field Researchers Organization's database alone contains thousands of reports, and that's just one organization. State wildlife agencies receive reports that never

make it into any public database. Law enforcement agencies take reports that are filed and forgotten. Private researchers collect a caunts that are shared in confidence and never published. The actual number of encounters that have occurred over the past century is almost certainly far larger than what's been formally documented, and the consistency of those reports, the physical description, the behavior, the habitat, the vocalizations, the reactions of witnesses across geographic regions,

time periods, and demographic groups is striking. These are not people reading each other's reports and copying them. These are independent witnesses, separated by hundreds or thousands of miles, describing the same kind of creature in the same kind of environment, exhibiting the same kind of behavior. That pattern means something, and it means it whether the PG film is real or not. I am one of those witnesses. I've told this story before, and I'll tell it again as many

times as it takes. Something happened to me in the woods of North Georgia in nineteen eighty six when I was a kid. I didn't go look at for it. I wasn't on a Bigfoot expedition. I was a young boy in the woods and I experienced something that I have never been able to explain. I don't embellish it, I don't dress it up with details that aren't there. But it happened, and it lit a fire in me that has been burning for nearly forty years. It's the

reason I do what I do. It's the reason I've spent decades researching this subject with the same rigor and tenacity I brought to sixteen years of law enforcement with the Atlanta Police Department. When you've spent that much time working cases, interviewing witnesses, separating the credible from the incredible, evaluating evidence under pressure, and making decisions based on incomplete information, you develop a finely tuned sense for when something is

real and when it isn't. I've carried that skill set into every aspect of my Sasquatch research, and I've applied it to every encounter report I've ever investigated. And in the summer of twenty twenty four, while I was in Washington State filming the documentary Read My big Foot Life, I saw one and stay tuned.

No piece of film, no documentary, no skeptics blog post, no clever debunking can touch that. It's as real as the ground under your feet. I know what I saw. No documentary about a sixty year old piece of film is going to change that. And this is the point I really want to drive home, because it's the most important thing I'll say in this entire newsletter. The Patterson Gimlin film can be fake and Sasquatch can still be real. These two things are not mutually exclusive. They never were.

This is a point I've been making for years, long before Capturing Bigfoot existed, and I'll continue making it until people understand how critical the distinction is. The PG film is evidence, one piece of evidence among many. If it turns out to be fraudulent, then it's bad evidence, and bad evidence should be discarded. That's how rational inquiry works. You don't throw out the entire case. Because one piece of evidence turns out to be compromised, You throw out

the compromised evidence, and you look at what's left. And what's left in the case of Sasquatch is an enormous body of eyewitness testimony from credible witnesses spanning hundreds of years, and every imaginable demographic hunters, hikers, law enforcement officers, park rangers, wildlife biologists, military veterans, truck drivers, families on camping trips, children, grandparents, people who had never thought about Bigfoot for a single

second of their lives until the moment they found themselves face to face with something they couldn't explain. What's left is a pattern of track evidence that has been studied by qualified scientists. What's left is audio recordings of vocalizations that don't match any known animal. What's left is a phenomenon that refuses to go away, no matter how many

times skeptics declare it dead. Even Brian Dunning, the host of the Skeptoid podcast, who has been arguing for years that the PG film is a hoax, acknowledged this point in his analysis of the documentary. He wrote, and I'm paraphrasing here, that the Patterson Gimlin film being a hoax says nothing about the existence of Bigfoot any more than Ray Wallace's family's admission that the footprints he laid across the Pacific Northwest since nineteen fifty eight were fake. That's

coming from a committed skin and he's right. A fake piece of evidence doesn't disprove the thing it was faking. It just means that particular piece of evidence is worthless. The underlying question remains open. I understand why the PG film became the centerpiece. It was visual, it was dramatic. It was tangible in a way that eyewitness testimony isn't. You could freeze it on a frame and point to it and say, there, right there, that's what we're talking about.

It gave the community a totem, a rallying point, something to organize around. But that dependence on a single piece of evidence was always a vulnerability, and some of us have been saying so for a long time. When you build your house on one pillar and that pillar cracks, the house comes down, But Sasquatch doesn't live in that house. Sasquatch lives in the forest. I want to talk about what this means for the community going forward, because I

think we're at a crossroads. The reaction to capturing Bigfoot is going to follow predictable lines, and in many cases it already has. The skeptics are doing their victory lapse, and some of them have been waiting a long time for this moment. On the other end of the spectrum, there will be people who refuse to engage with the evidence at all, who will dismiss the documentary Sight Unseen, who will accuse Clint Patterson of being a paid shill

or a grifter looking for attention. Matt Moneymaker's preemptive dismissal is a preview of what's to come from that camp. Bigfoot researcher Matt Crowley pose the question on social media that I think is the most precient thing anyone has

said about this so far. Will Bigfoot content creators with podcasts and YouTube channels rush to interview Clint Patterson or will he be sidelined and never spoken of again, Like previous debunkings of prominent Bigfoot evidence that have been conspicuously ignored by even the most prominent names in the field. That's a question that cuts to the heart of whether this community is genuinely interested in truth or only interested in maintaining the narrative. I'll tell you something else that

concerns me. We've seen this pattern before in the Bigfoot community. A piece of evidence gets challenged, the believers circle the wagons, the skeptics gloat. Everybody retreats to their corners, and nothing changes. Nobody learns anything, nobody raises their standards, nobody asks harder questions of the next piece of evidence that comes along. The community absorbs the blow, develops a callous and goes

right back to doing what it was doing before. If that's what happens after capturing Bigfoot, then we will have wasted this moment entirely, because here's the uncomfortable truth that nobody wants to hear. The Patterson Gimlin film was always a weak foundation for the Sasquatch phenomenon, regardless of whether

it was authentic or not. Even if the PG film is one hundred percent genuine footage of a real Sasquatch, it was still a single piece of ambiguous evidence from nineteen sixty seven, shot by a man with a complicated reputation under circumstances that were inherently difficult to verify. Hanging the credibility of an entire field of research on that kind of evidence was always a strategic error, and it was an error that some of us pointed out quietly and not so quietly for years. Now the bill is

coming due. The path forward, in my view, is not to mourn the PG film or to defend it to the last breath. The path forward is to build a body of evidence that doesn't need the PG film. That means rigorous field work. That means standardized reporting protocols. That means environmental DNA sampling. That means trail camera networks and acoustic monitoring stations and thermal imaging surveys conducted with scientific methodology,

not just with enthusiasm. That means partnering with mainstream scientists wherever possible, and being willing to accept negative results with the same openness that we accept positive ones. That means frankly, growing up as a research community and demanding more of ourselves than we have demanded in the past. And in the middle of all of this, there will be a large number of people who are genuinely shaken, who feel like the ground has been pulled out from under them,

who aren't sure what to believe anymore. I want to speak directly to that last group, to you, if you're feeling rattled by this, if you're questioning everything you thought you knew, I want you to take a breath and think about what actually changed. A piece of film from nineteen sixty seven has been credibly challenged.

is not the territory. I think this moment could ultimately be healthy for the Sasquatch research community, painful as it might feel right now. For too long, the PG film has been treated as sacred ground, an untouchable artifact that couldn't be questioned without being accused of betraying the cause. That kind of thinking is antithetical to genuine inquiry. It's the mindset of religion not research. I've watched people get shouted down at conferences for even suggesting that the film

might not be authentic. I've seen researchers have their credibility attacked and their motives questioned simply for applying the same standards of skepticism to the PG film that they would apply to any other piece of evidence. That's not how you build a credible field of research. That's how you build a cult. And I say that as someone who loves this community and has devoted the better part of

his adult life to it. If we're serious about understanding what's out there in the forests of North America, and I am deadly serious about it, then we have to be willing to follow the evidence wherever it leads, even when it leads to uncomfortable places. If the evidence ultimately shows that the PG film was staged, then we acknowledge that, we learn from it, and we move on to the

evidence that remains. If the evidence shows that the newly discovered footage is something other than what the documentary claims, b roll, a replica, or something else entirely, then we acknowledge that too. We follow the truth, we don't pick a side, and then fight to the death defending it. That's not research, that's tribalism. I've been in the field.

I've talked to hundreds of witnesses. I've heard accounts from people who had no reason to fabricate their stories, no book to sell, no podcast to promote, no social media following to build.

no documentary is going to erase it. So where does this leave us? I'll tell you where it leaves me in exactly the same place I was before Capturing Bigfoot premiered, but with more work to do and more conversations to have. I'm a man who has spent nearly four decades researching these creatures. I'm a former law enforcement officer who knows how to evaluate evidence and assess the credibility of witnesses.

I'm a podcaster who has interviewed hundreds of people about their encounters and heard the trembling in their voices and seen the tears in their eyes as they described experiences that changed their lives. Researcher who has spent countless hours in the field, in the forests, in the places where these things are seen. And I'm a witness who has seen one of these beings from ten feet away and knows, not believes, not hopes, not wishes, knows that they are real.

The Patterson Gimlin film was never the reason I believed. It was never the foundation of my work. It was never the bedrock of the Sasquatch phenomenon, no matter how much the media and the popular culture wanted to treat it that way. If the evidence in capturing Bigfoot holds up, and what's being reported certainly sounds damning, then the research community needs to reckon with that, honestly, But I'm not going to make that call based on secondhand reports, and

neither should you. I'm pursuing an interview with Mark Evans. I'm working on getting an advanced screening of the film. I've spoken with Doug Hichek, who offers a credible alternative interpretation of the footage. I've spoken with Bill Munz, who has physically examined the film and believes it doesn't prove what the documentary claims. I've reached out to those close to Bob Gimlin and am working to secure his perspective.

I'm doing the work, and when I've examined the evidence for myself, I'll share my conclusions with you openly, honestly, and without agenda. Because the sasquatch phenomenon is bigger than one piece of film, bigger than one group of cowboys

from Yakima, bigger than one family's sixty year secret. It is, in my view, one of the most fascinating and important zoological questions of our time, and the answer to that question will not be found by arguing about whether a retired pepsi bottler fit inside a modified guerrilla suit in nineteen sixty seven. It will be found in the field in the forests by researchers who are willing to do

the hard, unglamorous, patient work of seeking the truth. It will be found by people who go into the woods, not with cameras and costumes, but with open minds and steady nerves and a willingness to accept what they find, whatever that turns out to be. I'm still doing that work. I hope you'll keep doing it with me. One more thing. I know this newsletter is going to generate some heated discussion,

and I welcome it. If you want to talk about this, really talk about it, not just shout past each other. I'm here, reach out on social media, drop a comment, send an email Brian at Paranormalworldproductions dot com.

If Capturing Bigfoot vindicates your position on the Patterson Gimlin film, then fair enough. But I'd encourage you to resist the temptation to extrapolate from a single debunked film to the entire phenomenon. The hoaxing of one piece of evidence does not constitute proof that the subject of that evidence doesn't exist.

That's a logical fallacy, and you know it. The question of whether Sasquatch exists is an empirical one, and it will be answered or not on the basis of the total body of evidence, not on the basis of what Roger Patterson did or didn't do in a California creek bed in October of nineteen sixty seven. If your interest is in truth, then keep your mind open. If your interest is only in being right, well enjoy the moment. But the woods are still out there, and they're still

full of things we don't understand. Stay tuned. I'm not done with this story, not by a long shot. When I get that screening, when I sit down with Evans, when I hear from Gimlin, you'll be the first to know. I'll dedicate a full episode to this across.

examine the evidence for yourself, think critically. Don't let anyone, not a filmmaker, not a skeptic, not a true believer, and not me, tell you what to think. Look at the evidence and make up your own mind. That's all any of us can do. And if you come to a different conclusion than I do, that's fine. Honest disagreement based on genuine examination of the evidence is healthy. It's the people who form opinions without examining the evidence who

worry me. And right now, in the immediate aftermath of this documentaries premiere, there are an awful lot of people doing exactly that on both sides of the aisle. Until next time, stay curious, stay skeptical in the right ways, and for the love of everything, stay in the woods.