I wrote the stories that appear in my book, Strange But True, one at a time. The first story I tackled wound up as Chapter 9, The Mystery of Dead Mountain, in the final book. The original version of this chapter included much more background on the Bigfoot legend. Here is the material that didn’t make it into the final version.
Read more about Bigfoot, the Yeti, and the mysterious deaths of nine young hikers in the remote Ural Mountains in Strange But True, coming out October 1, 2019.
Caught on Film
To prove that Bigfoot or any other animal exists, scientists must capture a dead or living specimen. Bigfoot believers have neither. But they do have a movie. It’s shaky, pixelated, and lasts just 59.5 seconds. Two men, Roger Patterson and Bob Gimlin, made the film in October 1967. Patterson had been hunting for Bigfoot for years. He’d heard of sightings around Bluff Creek in northern California. So he and Gimlin set out into the wilderness on horseback, carrying a rented video camera. They say that as they came upon the creek, the horses suddenly spooked. That’s when they saw a large, hairy, female creature stooped over the water. She got up and started to walk away. Patterson grabbed the camera and filmed until the creature disappeared into the trees. At one point in the movie, the Bigfoot looks back toward the camera. That one look has captured many viewers’ imaginations. They desperately want to believe that the film is real.
Is it real? Or a hoax? When author Greg Long investigated the story, he found Philip Morris, a costume-maker who says Patterson bought a gorilla suit from him. He also interviewed Bob Hieronymous, Gimlin’s next-door neighbor, who says he wore the costume in the film. Patterson had promised to pay him $1,000, but never did. Also, Patterson had the motivation to fake a sighting. He’d already been working on a documentary about the search for Bigfoot, but was having trouble selling it. “Money was the motivation,” Long said. “Patterson was poor… He wanted to make an easy buck. That’s my theory.”[1]
Knock, Knock
Even if the film isn’t real, Bigfoot believers still have lots of other evidence. They have hair, droppings, and hundreds of plaster casts of giant footprints. They also have first-hand accounts from people who claim to have seen the beast. Yet most serious scientists shy away from the subject. Bryan Sykes, a geneticist at Oxford University in England, thought this was too bad. “Science doesn’t reject anything,” he says. “It just examines the evidence for and against.”[2] It wasn’t completely out of the question that a small population of ape-like creatures might live, undetected, in a remote part of the world.
He decided to pursue the Bigfoot legend to the deep woods of the United States. His guide for one trip was a young woman named Lori Simmons. Her father had spent most of his life living in the forest, hunting for Bigfoot. She had carried on his work. Simmons took Sykes to a tree in the Cascade Mountains in Washington state. She thought a Bigfoot, nicknamed “Big Guy,” lived under the tree. When she stamped on the ground, Big Guy would knock back. At first, nothing happened when she stamped. But then, Sykes says, “I heard these knocks coming from the base of the tree.” By the afternoon, “the sounds became more and more vivid and growly,” he says.[3]
It was a frightening experience. But Sykes was determined to get to the bottom of it. So he went back with a park ranger. They both heard the sounds again. But the ranger offered a simpler explanation. The tree was actually two old, hollow trees that had grown close together. One tree’s branch went through the bark of its neighbor. When the wind blew, the hollow trees rubbed together, making strange sounds that traveled down the trunk and seemed to come from the ground. Big Guy was most likely an illusion.
[1] Smith, Blake and Karen Stollznow. “Suitable for Framing.” Podcast. Monstertalk, February 17, 2010. Retrieved June 14, 2018 from https://monstertalk.skeptic.com/suitable_for_framing
[2] Sykes, Bryan. June 4, 2018. Personal Interview
[3] Ibid.
Plenty of mundane explanations exist for the hair, droppings, and footprint casts, too. (Hint: the hairs typically come from bears or other ordinary animals. Scientists have done DNA tests.) Science can never prove that Bigfoot doesn’t exist. But we have no strong evidence to suggest that Bigfoot is real.