The Problem with Patty

Let me begin by saying that I’m a believer: I am convinced that there are small populations of large, bipedal, hominids scattered throughout much of North America. I believe that they call the deep woods home and can be broken up into several subspecies. I believe they are highly intelligent, fast, frighteningly strong, and extremely adept at concealing themselves. I believe they are mostly shy, but can also be territorial and even dangerous. I believe that they are living among us today and that people regularly encounter them. I believe in Sasquatch.

I realize that there is a dearth of physical evidence to prove the existence of these creatures, and for many people, that’s a deal breaker. Fair enough. I, however, am not a scientist, and can afford myself a lower standard of proof: If we don’t have the physical evidence to prove Sasquatch’s existence beyond a reasonable doubt, we certainly have a preponderance of it to build a circumstantial case, and that’s enough for me.

I believe because I grew up in the Pacific Northwest, where these creatures are things of lore, long before Europeans arrived on the scene. I read about them as a kid and even met a couple of people who claimed to have seen them with their own eyes. I spent a lot of time in those dark, misty forests as a hiker, fisherman, and Search and Rescue volunteer, and understood just how vast and wild these places are — that nearly any creature that wished to avoid human detection could easily do so.

I’ve gone through life as a quiet believer, often facing ridicule among my friends, when, after a beer or six, I’d out myself as a Bigfoot devotee. But it wasn’t until recently that my interest was rekindled, thanks largely to the world of podcasts. Since then I have listened to countless hours of first-person encounter stories, where witness after witness describes similar anatomy, and more importantly — behavior — of these creatures. This has really served to cement my belief. Sure there are a few crackpots on these shows, but they can’t all be lying. Why would they, when the only thing they have to gain is scorn and derision?

Like many of us, one of my first introductions to the possibility of the existence of Sasquatch was the Patterson-Gimlin film. Shot in 1967 at Bluff Creek in northern California by Roger Patterson and his partner Bob Gimlin, this footage of what seems to be a large, female Bigfoot traversing a riverbed is etched into our cultural memory, a kind of Zapruder film of cryptozoology. Everyone’s seen it and everyone knows it; if you’re a believer, you’ve probably poured over it hundreds of times. I’ve certainly spent hours geeking out on each iconic frame, and from the first time I saw it as a child in the 70’s, I just knew that it had to be real.

I carried this conviction with me for most of my life, and saw that, at least among the the online bigfoot community, most everyone agreed with me. Almost every Squatch-head thinks that “Patty” — the Bigfoot featured in the footage — is the real deal, and that both Roger Patterson (who died in 1972) and Bob Gimlin are trustworthy actors. They just happened to be in the right place at the right time and captured something that had never been shot before. Amazing stuff, right?

The Patterson-Gimlin film is extraordinary, and certainly looks like a real Sasquatch making her way along that creek. As a result it’s usually offered up as the most convincing piece of evidence in our crusade to be believed. It’s been analyzed, enhanced, picked apart, and debated over, but to this day has never been 100% debunked. We believers love the film and we love to believe in it. That’s why it’s been so hard for me to reckon with the fact that it’s most likely a hoax.

If you look at the film, and most importantly, the film’s backstory, a number of red flags shoot up. Not a single one disproves the footage outright, but when taken as a whole — when we consider the preponderance of evidence — it’s very difficult to arrive at any other conclusion than that Roger Patterson most likely faked the whole thing for notoriety and, more importantly, monetary gain. This is a very inconvenient truth, but I think that’s it’s important all of us believers look very carefully at the evidence we’re putting out there. And if the biggest, most notorious piece of proof in our whole arsenal turns out to be lie, where does that leave us?

The Film

Roger Patterson shot the footage on a 16mm camera that he had rented for the occasion (He was actually jailed for not returning it on time). Anyone who has seen the film knows that the footage is pretty shaky (especially the beginning) and grainy as hell. It’s been stabilized and “enhanced” by loads of internet sleuths, but you can’t ever make a film any better than the original footage. You can play around with the contrast, you can slow it down, but you can’t magically improve shitty-looking film. The reality is that Patterson-Gimlin is a low-res affair. People claim to see all sorts of details (muscle definition, moving fingers and toes) that just may not really exist. In this sense, the film is a kind of Rorschach test.

Here are my concerns with the film, especially as they relate to the creature itself. I’m not a expert in this kind of analysis so will just list a couple things that stand out to me:

1. The butt

Patty has a big ol’ ass, a voluminous booty that really doesn’t move during any point during her legendary lope towards the woods. And there is no butt cleft, which is weird. This, to me, looks like padding, like a giant pillow stuffed up in there. This causes my fake alarm to go off.

2. The walk

While there are those who maintain that a human could never move like Patty does, I’ve always been struck by just how humanlike her gait is. To me, it very much looks like it could just be a person strolling along that creek bed.

3. The breasts

How could the breasts raise red flags? This is one of the first things people point out when defending the validity of this film. I know I because I used to: “Check it out! She has breasts! Who would go through the trouble to put breasts on an ape suit?” Well… maybe Roger Patterson would, since he already had drawings of buxom female Bigfoots in his book that he self-published the year before.

The Actors

This is where things get interesting, where a few bullshit buzzers turn into a four-alarm fire. I’ll be the first to admit that the film — despite a few eyebrow-raising elements — is pretty convincing.. But once we look into the backstory of how this film even got made, it becomes much harder to swallow. This is especially true when it comes to our protagonist, Roger Patterson.

Hailing from Yakima, Washington, Patterson was a rodeo rider who got interested in Sasquatch in 1961. From that point forward he was on a mission to make a name for himself. He was a self-promoter and clearly eager to establish himself as the nation’s premier Bigfoot researcher. Some described him as a con-man and a charlatan. He was a dreamer, a schemer, a slacker, an artist, and a notorious deadbeat. And it’s clear that his reputation for trustworthiness was less-than-pristine.

But what even drew him to Bluff Creek? He went there on the urging of Ray Wallace, who supposedly discovered Sasquatch tracks there in the late 50’s. It turns out, however, that Wallace had been a hoaxer all along. So the very reason Patterson chose to film in that location was based, at least partly, on faulty intelligence. This alone should cast serious doubt on the whole endeavor.

As for the “endeavor,” Patterson was making a DIY movie — a docudrama about people tracking Sasquatch — that was to include flashback scenes involving the creature. He’d need a suit for this. He enlisted the help of Yakima friends, including Bob Gimlin. They’d evidently done some shooting in May/June of 1967 and returned on Friday, October 20th, to get more footage, and the rest is history: Man with rented camera heads into the woods to make a fake movie about Bigfoot and… Voila! He emerges with footage of actual Bigfoot. Who’d have thunk it? It’s almost as if he knew what he was going to find.

Patterson went on to get the film out there and profit from it. He made several different deals, all of which meant money in his pocket, along with interviews and lectures and the prestige that goes with being the guy who discovered Sasquatch.

Sadly, he didn’t live long enough to enjoy the fruits of filmmaking. He died of cancer in 1972, though he maintained, on his deathbed, that the film was real.

What really makes me smell fish here is motive: Roger Patterson wanted to find Bigfoot, perhaps more than anyone else at the time. He’d staked his whole life — his financial future and (admittedly shaky) reputation — on it. He had everything to gain by coming forward with proof of the creature. The fact that he magically got what he was looking for while out to shoot a Sasquatch movie is a coincidence of such magnitude that it nearly reinvents the word.

That Patterson knew that he was dying of cancer and wanted to provide for his dying wife may explain both his motivation for making the film, and the fact he never owned up to the hoax. And yes, an established costume maker, with nothing to gain, claims that he sold Patterson a gorilla suit in 1967.

Bob Heironimus was a neighbor of Patterson, and says that he was offered $1000 for one day of shooting on Roger’s film. The only catch is he’d have to wear a monkey suit. augmented with a football helmet and shoulder pads to help bulk it all up. Bob was a laborer by trade, and that amount of money must have been too much for him to turn down. Sp he headed down to California, shot the famous scene, and then made his way back to Yakima, where his mom and two brothers both attested to seeing the suit in the back of his car.

Bob Heironimus went on TV in the 1990’s and took a lie detector test, which he passed. I actually have little faith in polygraphs (Patterson is said to have passed one, too.), but the fact that he’s on public record with this story (more than once) does lend credence to it. And he does a pretty convincing Patty walk.

Bob Gimlin was there. Whether this was a real creature or a hoax, he is the one surviving eye witness to this encounter, so he should know better than anyone, right?

Bob is beloved in the Sasquatch community and I’m certainly not here to disparage his name. After all, who doesn’t love a folksy old cowboy? However, let’s consider the facts:

Bob was silent for decades about the film. He attributes this to his wife’s aversion to publicity, but could it also be because he knew the footage was faked? Back in the 90’s he even admitted that the idea it was all hoaxed was possible, though he included himself among the potentially hoodwinked.

Gimlin now does conventions (for a fee, I’m sure) and talks to the media. One recent interview made me scratch my head, however: Gimlin recounts the filming of Patty, which is said to have taken place on Friday, October 20th, 1967. During the interview, however, not only does he repeatedly say that they were out there on a Saturday afternoon, but that it was also Labor Day weekend. In 1967, Labor Day fell on September 4th, a good six weeks earlier. Perhaps this is just a mix up of dates, or the product of old age, but for something as significant as this film, it’s a major discrepancy and calls into question the credibility of the whole affair.

The Legacy

The Patterson-Gimlin film went on to become the most phenomenal exhibit in the case to prove the existence of Sasquatch to the world. It’s been viewed by untold millions of people and to this day is probably the first thing a lot of people think of when you bring up the word “Bigfoot.” For many of us, it was the “gateway drug” that got us into the subject of Sasquatch in the first place, so perhaps we should just leave it alone. Perhaps we should keep saying that his film is 100% authentic, even if we have our doubts. Perhaps the sheer amount of curiosity and wonder that the footage has managed to spark is simply worth it.

The truth matters, though, especially in this crazy little world that we believers inhabit. The Bigfoot community has always been rife with charlatans and hoaxers. That’s why so many people roll their eyes and turn to mockery as soon as the subject of these creatures is even broached. It’s therefore our duty to root these liars and self-aggrandizers out, because in the end, they do damage to our cause.

We’ll probably never know for sure whether the Patterson-Gimlin film is an exquisite fake or an example of lightning in a bottle, but once you examine all of the facts and even innuendo surrounding the footage, the scale tips much further toward the side of “hoax.” At least this is what I have come to believe, albeit reluctantly. Roger Patterson was a slippery snake, was already making a Bigfoot film, and had just too much to gain personally for everything to fall so perfectly into place. Throw in the testimony of several witnesses who claim to have been party to the scam, and the house of cards collapses. There’s only so much bullshit we can be expected to choke down.

Still, it looks amazing, doesn’t it?

Though I’m from the Northwest, I’ve lived in South Korea for years now, where I teach at a university. Recently the subject of the paranormal came up in one of my classes, so I decided to show my students the Patterson-Gimlin film. Now these were young Koreans who had never even heard of Sasquatch, virgin eyes with no dog in the fight.

So I played the film, turned the lights back on, and then took a poll.

“By a show of hands, who thinks this was a real creature?” I asked. No one made a move.

“Now, who thinks it was just a man in a suit.” All twenty students raised their hands without hesitation.

This, of course, is just anecdotal, but it made me realize that we believers sometimes want to believe so badly that we lose objectivity. We easily forget that what seems to be real to us may look laughably fake to others. We too often see only what we want to, and do so at our own peril.