PATTERSON-GIMLIN

Opening

On 20 October 1967, Roger Patterson and Bob Gimlin, two horsemen from Yakima, Washington, were riding along Bluff Creek in northern California, about 25 logging-road miles northwest of Orleans. They say they came round a fallen tree and saw a large, hair-covered figure walking upright on a sandbar. Patterson's horse reared. He grabbed a rented 16mm camera and ran after the figure, shouting to Gimlin to cover him, and by his estimate got within about 25 feet, filming as it walked away, turned its head to look back at him, and vanished into the trees. The result is just under a minute of shaky colour film, about 950 frames, and it is still the most argued-over piece of Bigfoot evidence there is.

In 2026 the argument changed shape. A documentary brought out a 16mm reel marked 1966, a year before Bluff Creek, showing a slimmer figure walking into the woods, and Patterson's son said on camera that the film was staged.

Timeline

1959Patterson's obsession starts with an article in True magazine, "America's Abominable Snowman".

1966Patterson self-publishes a book, Do Abominable Snowmen of America Really Exist?, mostly a collection of newspaper clippings illustrated with his own drawings. He is planning a Bigfoot documentary with friends from Yakima.

13 May 1967Patterson rents a Cine-Kodak K-100 camera from Sheppard's Camera Shop in Yakima. He keeps it well past the rental period.

17 October 1967An arrest warrant is issued over the unreturned camera.

20 October 1967The filming at Bluff Creek. Gimlin has a rifle and does not fire. The pair cast footprints and leave the area. Patterson's brother-in-law, Al DeAtley, handles the processing and later the business side.

Late 1967 onwardPatterson goes on the talk shows of Johnny Carson, Merv Griffin and Art Linkletter, and tours the film round theatres, charging $2 a ticket. One associate recalls that at the Salt Palace in Salt Lake City they played two weeks after Simon and Garfunkel and took more money. According to Variety's review of Capturing Bigfoot, much of the money went to DeAtley, who used it to rescue his construction company and build a country mansion.

Late 1967 to 1969Patterson is arrested over the camera after returning home. The charge is dismissed after he returns it in working order in 1969.

1972Patterson dies of Hodgkin's lymphoma. He maintains to the end that the creature was real.

1974 to 1976Gimlin, who says he never received his share of the profits, sues with backing from Bigfoot researcher René Dahinden and wins his one-third share.

30 January 1999Bob Heironimus, another Yakima man, says through a lawyer's press release that he wore the suit.

16 August 2002Philip Morris, a North Carolina costume maker, says on Charlotte radio station WBT that he sold Patterson a gorilla suit by mail order in 1967.

2004Greg Long's book The Making of Bigfoot sets out Heironimus's account: he says he was promised $1,000 and never paid. On 6 October, Morris stages a recreation for National Geographic. It does not look like the original.

Over the yearsBigfoot researcher Cliff Crook claims enhanced frames show a zip on the figure's back. Other analysts looking at the same frames disagree.

About 2005After decades of near silence, Gimlin begins appearing at Bigfoot conferences, saying the film is genuine.

2011The film site, lost to regrowth, is relocated by researchers.

12 March 2026Marq Evans's documentary Capturing Bigfoot premieres at SXSW in Austin. Its wide release is set for 20 October 2026, the film's anniversary.

Key figures

Roger Patterson was a former rodeo rider and inventor with debts and a Bigfoot obsession. Some acquaintances later described him to Greg Long as "a liar and a conman". He never confessed.

Bob Gimlin, a horse trainer and Korean War veteran, has said for decades that what he saw was real and that nobody wore a costume. He took part in Capturing Bigfoot but has made no public statement about the 1966 reel.

Bob Heironimus says he wore the suit. Philip Morris says he sold it. Their descriptions of the suit do not match each other.

Clint Patterson, Roger's son, says his mother told him the film was faked and that he watched his father burn the suit in a barrel behind the family house. In the documentary he also remembers finding a pile of second-hand fur coats in his father's usually locked shed. He says his mother told him the truth about ten years before the documentary, and that when he planned to say so publicly she disowned him over the lost income.

On the side of the film, anthropologists Grover Krantz and Jeff Meldrum argued that the figure's gait and visible muscle movement were beyond a 1967 costume. Bill Munns, a make-up and effects artist who joined Universal in 1969, says in the documentary that the figure could not have been a man in a costume. Primatologist John Napier, who took the wider Bigfoot question seriously, thought the film was a hoax. Anthropologist David Daegling has argued that the timeline is only a problem if one assumes the film was shot on 20 October.

Physical and documentary trail

What survives: the film itself, though the original reel's whereabouts are unknown and analysis relies on copies; the footprint casts; the camera rental records and the arrest warrant; Gimlin's lawsuit; Heironimus's and Morris's accounts; and now a 40-second 16mm reel that Teresa Brooks found in her late father Norm Johnson's safe and brought to Marq Evans (accounts differ on whether that was 2022 or 2024). Johnson worked at a Boeing film lab and was connected to Patterson and Gimlin through his brother Dave. Markings on the film date it to 1966. It shows a slimmer figure walking into woods much like the 1967 location; Evans calls it "a trial run, a rehearsal that was never discarded."

Still missing: the suit, any physical record of its purchase, and a settled frame rate. Patterson said 18 frames a second, others argue 16 or 24, and the figure's estimated speed and stride depend on which is right.

There is little doubt that the scientific evidence taken collectively points to a hoax of some kind.

Things you might not know

• The camera was technically stolen. Patterson was already the subject of an arrest warrant over the rented camera three days before he filmed with it.
• Frame 352 is the famous one. It is the "look back", where the figure turns its head toward the camera, and it is the still most people picture.
• The film has no copyright. It was shown without a copyright notice, so in the US it is in the public domain. A 1978 settlement still gave René Dahinden the rights to all 952 still frames.
• Fifty million people watched it on TV. The 1974 documentary Monsters! Mystery or Myth drew an audience of that size.
• It became an emoji. The "hairy creature" emoji added to Unicode in September 2025 strikes the same mid-stride pose.
• The director has a family link. Marq Evans's parents lived in Yakima, and his father once worked for Al DeAtley's paving company.
• The new reel came from a film lab worker's safe. Norm Johnson's daughter asked Marq Evans to help process it, not knowing what was on it.

What the documentary doesn't prove

Capturing Bigfoot makes the strongest case yet that the film was staged, and its conclusion may well be right. But some of its evidence carries less weight than the film suggests.

• The date is the film stock's. The 1966 marking is a Kodachrome II edge code, which dates when the stock was made, not when it was shot. Kodak reused the same symbols every twenty years, and Kodachrome II only appeared around 1961, so the stock is from 1966. The documentary's own expert said the reel was "probably" exposed that year because the image is crisp and unfaded. That is a reasonable judgement, not a dated record.
• Patterson was already staging scenes. Friends from Yakima remember riding through the brush with dogs, chasing an imaginary Bigfoot and "acting out a story" for the film he hoped to sell. A costumed figure from those years fits a hoax rehearsal, but it could also be a scene from that dramatised film. The reel alone does not show which.
• Ray Wallace is missing. The documentary presents Jerry Crew's 1958 Bluff Creek cast as the first Bigfoot cast in the US. Crew was a bulldozer driver on Ray Wallace's road-building job there, and after Wallace died in 2002 his family said he made those tracks with carved wooden feet.
• Gimlin's "yes" is not a confession. Near the end, Clint Patterson and Heironimus join a convention signing queue to see Gimlin, now 92. Clint tells him the family is coming clean and asks if he is ready to as well. A "yes" comes back, but the exchange turns into a plan to tell everybody what an amazing person Roger was, and they are hurried along. Heironimus took the handshake as an admission. Gimlin made no statement about the film.
• The two suits still don't match. The documentary backs Heironimus as the man in the suit, but his account and Philip Morris's describe different suits, and the reel does not settle which, if either, is right.

Competing explanations

A staged film. Heironimus's confession, Morris's claim, Clint Patterson's account and the 1966 reel all point the same way, and Patterson had both the documentary plan and the debts. The weak points: the two hoax accounts describe different suits, and the reel's date and provenance rest on edge markings that date the stock rather than the shoot, and on one family's safe.

A real animal. Gimlin's consistent testimony and the biomechanical case made by Krantz and Meldrum: proportions, gait and muscle movement they argue no 1967 suit could produce. BFRO founder Matt Moneymaker has said the new reel cannot easily be verified and that the film "debunks any attempts to debunk it".

Later life of the case

Capturing Bigfoot split the Bigfoot community in 2026. Some long-time believers said the 1966 reel was enough for them to give up on the film; others questioned where it came from and stood by the anatomical analyses. Reviewing it for Variety on 18 October 2026, Owen Gleiberman called it astounding and wrote that it reveals the 1967 footage was a hoax. In Skeptical Inquirer, Benjamin Radford read it as a study in how confirmation bias kept advocates certain. Evans told People he did not set out to prove Bigfoot was not real, and that his film is about this one piece of footage and the people behind it. XYZ Films opened it in select US cities and on Prime Video on 20 October 2026, National Bigfoot Day and 59 years to the day after Bluff Creek. As of release day, Gimlin had made no public statement about the 1966 reel; press coverage noted that he still denies the film was staged.

Finding

The strongest reading now is that the Bluff Creek film was staged: a reel on 1966 film stock showing what looks like a rehearsal, a confession from inside Patterson's family, and a man who says he wore the suit. That is more than the case has ever had against it. It is not a settled confession from either man on the film. Patterson died saying it was real, and Gimlin has never said otherwise.

What still will not resolve: what Bob Gimlin has to say about the 1966 reel, and where the suit, if there was one, came from, since the two men who claim to know describe different suits.