According to Jeff Meldrum (an anatomist and a high-profile Sasquatch proponent), “This film remains among the most compelling evidence for the existence of sasquatch, detractors and skeptics notwithstanding.”68 For their part, those detractors and skeptics pull few punches. Napier was “puzzled by the extraordinary exaggeration of the walk,” asking, “Why ruin a good hoax by ordering my actor to walk in this artificial way?”69 Daniel Schmitt, an evolutionary anthropologist and a specialist in primate locomotion, echoed Napier’s conclusion, joking that “either this is a person trying to walk funny, or Bigfoot walks in a manner that is more or less identical to people walking this way.”70
Over forty years, an astonishing amount of ink has been spilled in analyzing the film. Re-creations have been staged and filmed, computer-animated scenes have been reconstructed, and countless diagrams have been drawn. At the end of this incredible effort, investigators still cannot agree on the basic facts about Patterson’s creature, such as how tall and heavy it was.
In the absence of either a type specimen for Bigfoot or smoking-gun evidence of a hoax, the film is unable, ultimately, to speak for itself. Luckily, circumstantial factors may cast light on the plausibility of the case: Roger Patterson’s character, the serendipitous circumstances of the filming, hearsay testimony that the film was a hoax, the apparently derivative structure of Patterson’s narrative, and the money that Patterson earned from the film.
• Proponents traditionally defend ambiguous cases of alleged cryptid encounters with the argument that the eyewitnesses are well-respected people of good character (ideally, professionals like doctors or police officers). For example, early cryptozoology author Ivan Sanderson described Jerry Crew, who preserved the Bluff Creek tracks, as “an active member of the Baptist Church, a teetotaler and a man with a reputation in his community that can only be described as heroic.”71 That option does not exist for Roger Patterson, a man characterized by even his defenders as “no angel … a slapdash kinda guy that you really shouldn’t do business with”72 and a “used-car salesman type of personality.”73
Greg Long made the first significant progress in the case in decades. For a book published in 2004, he adopted a novel strategy: ignore the film and examine the filmmaker. What emerged was not pretty. Interviews with members of Patterson’s family, friends, and colleagues (conducted over several years) paint a picture of a highly artistic, small-town hustler with dreams of the big score. A stage acrobat, carny, inventor, illustrator, Bigfoot sculptor, self-published Bigfoot author, and semi-pro rodeo rider, Patterson lived and breathed show-business schemes. He aggressively courted Hollywood long before filming Bigfoot.74 He also seems to have ripped off everyone he met, from family75 to friends to total strangers. (Bigfooter Dahinden accused him of “mail fraud, pure and simple.”)76 In the context of his Bigfoot film, that’s a bad combination indeed. As Long concludes, “Roger Patterson’s character fails the smell test. Sum up all the information about Roger Patterson, and it comes down to two simple points. One, he had the ability to conceive of and create a Bigfoot suit, and two, he was a crook.”77
• Whether Patterson was a saint or a sinner, the basic circumstances of the filming strain credibility. Patterson, a Bigfoot author, set out on a camping trip to film Bigfoot—and then he promptly did. As Benjamin Radford notes, this is a remarkable happenstance: “Patterson told people he was going out with the express purpose of capturing a Bigfoot on camera. In the intervening thirty-five years (and despite dramatic advances in technology and wide distribution of handheld camcorders), thousands of people have gone in search of Bigfoot and come back empty-handed.”78 Such extraordinary good fortune is not, however, unique in the annals of Bigfoot research. Others—including Ray Wallace, Ivan Marx, and Paul Freeman—have exhibited a remarkable ability to find tracks, sight Bigfoot, or film the creature more or less on demand. The explanation for such good luck has often turned out to be fraud. Could that be the case with the Patterson–Gimlin film?
• Patterson insisted that Bigfoot was “no farce, hoax or idiotic scheme. On the contrary, this could be the biggest scientific breakthrough in the study of the development of man since the beginning of time.”79 But as Daegling notes, “I have yet to correspond with anyone acquainted with Roger Patterson who thought he was above faking a film.”80 Indeed, we know that Patterson sometimes did film staged Bigfoot evidence. Explaining that fake Sasquatch footprints can be “dug into the ground with the fingers and or a hand tool,” Krantz rather stunningly recalled, “Roger Patterson told me he did this once in order to get a movie of himself pouring a plaster cast for a documentary he was making.”81 Krantz added, without apparent concern, “A few days later he filmed the actual sasquatch.”
Long presents extensive testimony from Bob Heironimus, who claims that he played the creature in the Patterson–Gimlin film. The “Bob H hypothesis,” as it is known, is of course fiercely opposed by the Bigfoot community. Critics point out, correctly, that the truth of Heironimus’s story cannot be confirmed. The case currently boils down to conflicting testimony from two close neighbors: Heironimus’s confession that he took part in the hoax staged by Patterson and Gimlin, versus Gimlin’s rebuttal that there was no hoax. Circumstantial evidence, though, is supportive of Heironimus. Living in the same town, Heironimus did know Patterson and Gimlin very well at the time. He even appeared in a different Bigfoot-related film project by Patterson, produced before the famous Patterson–Gimlin film.82 Bigfooter John Green, a strong critic of Heironimus’s tale, notes further corroborating evidence while also weighing in with an objection: “There is testimony that Heironimus had a fur suit, which he presumably used to play tricks on someone, but it is Heironimus’ changeable word alone that connects the suit in any way with Roger Patterson.”83 Testimony from several witnesses puts a fur suit in Heironimus’s trunk in the correct period,84 and it is clear that local rumor has linked Heironimus to the Patterson–Gimlin film since the late 1960s. Whether or not his story can ever be confirmed, it is certainly plausible.
• It is also suspicious that the Patterson–Gimlin film echoes William Roe’s alleged encounter with Bigfoot so exactly. From the settings (clearings) to the descriptions (the creatures are identical down to the fine details, including their “silver-tipped” hair and heavy, hair-covered breasts) to the behavior (the creatures unhurriedly walking away, each with a haunting look “over its shoulder as it went”) to the reactions (the witnesses watching over rifle barrels, unwilling to shoot such human-like creatures), the two accounts are practically clones. This is an “amazing set of similarities,” as Long put it. “In fact, so amazing I’d say this is where Patterson came up with the ‘script’ for his film.”85 We know that Patterson was willing to copy Bigfoot scenes from others, at least for some purposes: a book that he published in 1966 contains illustrations that he copied without credit from other artists.86 We also know that Patterson was familiar with Roe’s sighting because the book includes Patterson’s illustration of Roe’s encounter—a drawing that looks for all the world like a storyboard panel for the film that Patterson shot a year later. This suggests to many skeptics that the Patterson–Gimlin film is a hoax based on Roe’s story. Proponents counter that the similarities are equally consistent with accurate independent sightings of females from the same unknown primate species. This point is debatable, but it assumes that Roe’s account is genuine. If Roe’s report is a hoax, we would be compelled to conclude that the Patterson–Gimlin film is also a hoax.
• Finally, Patterson made a lot of money from his Bigfoot film. Whether he earned enough money to justify a hoax is a subjective question, but the film was clearly a windfall by Patterson’s perpetually broke standards. “One day he held out a $100,000 check that he got for the movie,” Patterson’s brother recalled. “At that time, that was quite a bit.”87
To promote and distribute the film, Patterson partnered with his brother-in-law Al DeAtley. Putting up the money to produce a feature-length movie from Patterson
’s footage, DeAtley took the show on the road. The business model was to roll from town to town, renting movie screens for private showings. With aggressive promotion of each screening as an event, they packed theaters with paying ticket holders. DeAtley recalled celebrating in their hotel room after the opening-night screening in a school auditorium: “So everything was cash—ones, fives, tens, and twenties. And we had a trash can full of money, and we were throwing it on each other on the bed and stuff !”88 (Hearing this, I can’t help thinking of the cartoon character Scrooge McDuck.)
Ivan Marx: The Bossburg “Cripple Foot” Fiasco
If the tracks at Bluff Creek, California, made Bigfoot a household name and the Patterson–Gimlin film gave the creature its enduring public face, it was the “Cripple Foot” case in Bossburg, Washington, that seduced Bigfoot’s highest-credentialed scientific defenders.89
In 1969, Bossburg (then a dying mining town, and now a ghost town) was the new home of a Bigfoot hunter named Ivan Marx.90 In an extraordinary coincidence, Bigfoot tracks promptly turned up at Marx’s local garbage dump in late November—even more coincidentally, discovered by Marx himself.91 These tracks, left in soft soil,92 had a distinctive characteristic: the right foot appeared to be severely malformed (figure 2.4). For Bigfoot researchers, this was an electrifying find. Unexpected and persuasive, the malformed footprints seemed to scream, “I was made by a real biological creature.” René Dahinden arrived within days; other researchers were close behind.
Further evidence (and coincidence) was not long in coming. On December 13, Marx and Dahinden went to check on some meat they had left out as bait. Getting out of the car to inspect one spot, Marx was gone for “only seconds before he came racing back,” shouting that he had discovered Bigfoot tracks in the snow.93 These 1,089 tracks, again showing the “crippled” foot, meandered aimlessly. Conveniently starting at a river, where footprints would not be recorded,94 the trail turned back on itself—crossing and recrossing a railway track, and crossing the same road and fence “several times”—before ending at the river, where it began.95 This route seemed a bit artificial. As Dahinden asked himself, “Why did the tracks happen to be just there, where [Dahinden] would be sure to go every day, where he checked all the time, within a few miles of the garbage dump where the thing had been reported seen all the time? It was the obvious place for a hoaxer to plant his work.”96
Figure 2.4 One of the “Cripple Foot” tracks, showing the unusual shape of the right foot that gave the case its name. (Reproduced by permission of Fortean Picture Library, Ruth-in, Wales)
In any event, the find led to a kind of Sasquatch gold rush. Everyone involved in the search for Bigfoot descended on Bossburg, armed with everything from tranquilizer guns to aircraft. This stampede reached a fever pitch when a hoaxer named Joe Metlow came forward with the claim to have a Sasquatch for sale. This bait triggered first a bidding war; then stakeouts and even a madcap chase on January 30, 1970, as competing “groups of hunters left Colville by plane, helicopter, in various vehicles and on snowshoes in an attempt to find the beast on their own”;97 and, eventually, the embarrassment of all involved.98
The hunters left, but the now-infamous Bossburg fiasco was far from over. As Dahinden relates, Marx continued to find Bigfoot evidence with unbelievable regularity: “It seemed that every time he called, Marx had found something; a handprint here, a footprint there, signs of an unusually heavy creature bedding down in the bush; always something to keep the trail warm.”99
And then, the biggest news yet: Marx announced that he not only had seen the creature with his own eyes—but also had captured full-color movie footage!100 Monster hunters rushed back to Bossburg to bid on Marx’s footage, offering the kind of money that would buy a new house.101 Then well-known Bigfoot hunter Peter Byrne swooped in with an odd arrangement: Marx agreed to put the film in a safe-deposit box, and Byrne put Marx on retainer (with a very hefty monthly salary, new camping gear, a snowmobile, and a new truck).102 Not bad for simply having some unverified film.
Meanwhile, new Bigfoot tracks turned up in the neighboring village of Arden—a staggering 5,000 footprints stomped across Arden’s fields and town dump as well as around the grocery store. Thousands of tourists flocked to see these tracks. Marx, on Byrne’s payroll, went to the scene and declared his plan to tranquilize Arden’s Sasquatch as soon as his dogs picked up the scent.103
But Byrne was less gullible than his deal with Marx seems to imply. He was literally buying time to dig into the circumstances of Marx’s too-lucky film. Sure enough, he soon discovered the truth: Marx had faked his movie. Local children tipped off Byrne about where the film had been shot, leading Byrne to conclude that Marx “had misled us about the site of the footage.”104 As he told the newspapers, the film had been made “about 10 miles from where Marx claims it was.”105 With the site identified, landmarks revealed that the creature was also much smaller than Marx had claimed. Worse, the direction of the shadows in Marx’s movie differed from those in his still photographs. This debunked his claim that they had been taken seconds apart; the “Sasquatch” had clearly worked with the photographer for some time. Finally, it was discovered that Marx had been spotted buying fur pieces in a nearby town.106
While Byrne was piecing together the true story, the Arden tracks were also revealed as a hoax. It turned out that a local bricklayer named Ray Pickens had created them, inspired by the news of Marx’s nearby “Cripple Foot” tracks. “I just wanted to show that anybody could fake them,” Pickens explained. His bogus feet were carved from 2- × 10-inch planks, and then nailed to boots. Notably, these confessed fakes had an inhumanly long stride, a characteristic typically cited by Bigfoot hunters as a sign of legitimacy. “The stride I made was about 54 inches—not at all hard to make,” Pickens explained. “You can do the same—just trot.”107
As news of Pickens’s hoax circulated, Byrne moved to confront Marx about “the fact that the footage was obviously a total fabrication.” He was too late. Marx had literally fled in the night, leaving his front door flapping in the wind and his belongings strewn across his front yard. When the safe-deposit box was opened, the only thing found were clips from old black-and-white Mickey Mouse cartoons.108 (In subsequent years, Marx promoted several other Bigfoot films that are universally acknowledged as hoaxes.)
Where does this leave us? The bottom line is that the famous “Cripple Foot” trackways were “discovered” by a repeat Bigfoot hoaxer. This is a red flag so huge and glaring that the evidence from Bossburg should long ago have been set aside by all serious Bigfoot researchers. Bizarrely, the exact opposite has happened. Even knowing that Marx hoaxed “Cripple Foot”–related evidence at the time that he “found” the tracks, some Bigfooters find it impossible to set aside what they view as the inherent believability of the “Cripple Foot” prints. As one Bigfoot book put it, “In the case of Ivan Marx, the Bossburg ‘cripple foot’ prints were just too ‘good’ and perhaps too numerous for him, or anyone else for that matter, to have fabricated.”109 We can dispense with the statement that the footprints were “too numerous” to have been hoaxed—after all, Pickens created a much larger number of tracks in the next town—but what of the argument that the “Cripple Foot” tracks were too “good” to have been faked?
Anthropologist Grover Krantz was seduced into the Bigfoot search by these tracks. Attempting to reconstruct the underlying anatomy of the foot, Krantz became convinced that the prints had to be genuine. If someone did hoax them, Krantz asserted, “with all the subtle hints of anatomy design, he had to be a real genius, an expert at anatomy, very inventive, an original thinker. He had to outclass me in those areas, and I don’t think anyone outclasses me in those areas, at least not since Leonardo da Vinci. So I say such a person is impossible, therefore the tracks are real.”110
However, Krantz’s fellow anthropologist David Daegling has very little confidence in Krantz’s speculative reconstruction of the underlying anatomy of “Cripple Foot”: “The problem wit
h Krantz’s argument is simply this: there was no demonstration at the time, nor has there been since, that a foot skeleton can be recreated out of a footprint with any degree of certainty. Investigation that has been done on this question suggests that footprints are simply not good indicators of underlying anatomy.”111
For his part, John Napier felt that the Bossburg tracks were “biologically convincing,”112 but his defense of the tracks boiled down, ultimately, to an argument from personal incredulity. “It is very difficult to conceive of a hoaxer so subtle, so knowledgeable—and so sick—who would deliberately fake a footprint of this nature,” wrote Napier. “I suppose it is possible, but it is so unlikely that I am prepared to discount it.”113 Napier may have been prepared to discount the glaring probability that the “Cripple Foot” tracks were faked, but we cannot. Again, the source of the evidence is Marx, a known Bigfoot hoaxer. What can we do with evidence found by a man who (as one Bigfoot researcher who knew Marx put it) “would lie to you just to [screw] with you”?114
Nothing. We can’t do anything with Ivan Marx’s evidence. The “Cripple Foot” case is radioactive.
EVIDENCE
Filtering
The case for Bigfoot rests on two primary lines of evidence: the reports of alleged eyewitnesses and footprints. We’ll consider both in a moment, but I want to first talk about a deep conceptual problem that runs through all Bigfoot evidence and, indeed, all of cryptozoology: how to filter good data from bad.
Everyone agrees that some eyewitness reports and footprints are hoaxes or mistakes. When pressed on this, cryptozoologists often concede the likelihood that most accounts may be inaccurate. On the face of it, this seems to be a small concession: after all, it would only take one confirmed case to prove that Bigfoot exists. But even if we assume for the sake of argument that there is a signal hidden in the noise (and there is no compelling reason to make this assumption), how could we detect it? In other words, would we know a Sasquatch if we saw one?
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