Last night I got around to watching Sunday’s episode of American Paranormal, featuring Bigfoot. There was nothing groundbreaking, and it was obviously biased towards the Bigfoot being real. There were a couple of howlers, in particular when it came to the famous Patterson-Gimlin movie. Looking around the web though, I am finding a lot of comments about the TV show on the Bigfoot believers sites along the lines of, “Well, I guess that settles it, Bigfoot is real.”

The Patterson-Gimlin movie is the famous one of Bigfoot walking away from the cameraman, shot in 1968 by Roger Patterson, with Bob Gimlin nearby.  American Paranormal did a 3D scan of the Bluff Creek site, then tried to use what was known about the camera and the distance from the subject to determine how big the subject was. They came up with height for “Patty” (the cutsey name Bigfooters have given the subject in the film) of 4’8″. Oops. That’s not nearly large enough to qualify as Bigfoot. So the American Paranormal people assumed that Patterson was using a different lens (though not the lens known to be on the camera), and with that unsupported assumption in place the height of Patty was determined to be over 7 feet. What struck me about this whole part of the show was that there was another variable that American Paranormal never questioned, and that’s the distance from the camera to subject. Apparently Bob Gimlin estimated that Patterson was 100 feet from Patty when he was shooting, and I guess because Bigfooters are so invested in the honesty of Bob Gimlin they refuse to even acknowledge that he could be wrong about any aspect of the sighting. But if the 100 foot estimate is incorrect, either because of an honest mistake on Gimlin’s part or some deception, then the height of “Patty” could be almost anything. I’m also not sure why, if you believe in the truth of Patterson’s film, you’d need to do all this fussing with camera lenses and filming distances. Patterson made casts of the prints “Patty” allegedly made, and they’re 14.5 inches long. From that you should be able figure out how tall Patty is. While the calculation has been done in the past (estimating Patty to be 8 feet tall), I think that even most Bigfooters are a little leery of Patterson’s reputation for dishonesty. For example, we know so much about the camera he used because it was a rental and he never returned it, causing a criminal complaint. Therefore, the tracks Patterson cast are considered questionable.

One claim made about the Patterson film on American Paranormal seemed to be refuted by the very footage they showed. It was in the section of the show about Patty’s shambling gait. When a human walks, the heel strikes the ground first, but Bigfooters have claimed that Patty’s feet land flat on the ground. Yet in the stabilized footage from the Patterson film shown in the episode, it’s clearer than ever that, when you can see Patty’s feet, she walked with the heel striking first, perhaps even a little exaggeratedly so. It was only in the “reconstruction” of Patty’s movements after the point her feet stop being visible in the film that the flat-footed walking is supposed to be happening.

There’s another aspect of the Patterson film that isn’t directly related to the American Paranormal episode, but I think it should get highlighted more often. In 1957, when interest in Sasquatch was ramping up and just before the initial incidents that created Bigfoot (yes, initially Sasquatch and Bigfoot were different things), a man by the name of William Roe swore out an affidavit that he saw a Sasquatch “Indian” in 1955 on Mica Mountain in British Columbia. You can read his entire statement here. The most striking thing about his account is that the Sasquatch he saw was female, and had large hairy breasts. Roe also specifically mentions that the creature he saw walked heel first, something that he, I guess,  incorrectly thought was different from humans. Several other features of Roe’s sighting are similar to the Patterson film, including the way it ends: the Sasquatch walks away quickly, and even looks over its shoulder.

Even more interesting, in 1960, True magazine ran an article by Ivan T. Sanderson titled “A New Look at America’s Mystery Giant,” illustrated with an artist’s interpretation of the Roe sighting. I couldn’t find a good reproduction of the painting on the web, so I had to capture it from the Kindle version of Bigfoot: The Life and Times of a Legend, an excellent book by Joshua Blu Buhs.

Compare that image to an iconic image from the Patterson film.

I find the resemblance striking. I suppose Bigfooters could say these are just two reports of the same creature, but that doesn’t quite wash. The elements that are most similar in the two images, like the bent-leg gait, the slumping posture, and swinging arms, are not included in Roe’s statement, so must be products of the illustrator’s imagination. Though we may never know exactly the circumstances of the Patterson film ‘s creation, I think it’s safe to say the hoaxers used the Roe sighting and the True illustration as a model for their encounter.

There’s a new special about Bigfoot coming to the National Geographic TV. You can see a couple clips here.

I wonder how the Bigfoot community is going to take Dr. Jeff Meldrum being described as “the world’s leading expert on Bigfoot.”