After nearly forty years of secrecy, the real truth is finally revealed behind the famous Roger Patterson "Bigfoot" film - a hoax that has managed to fool scores of scientists and millions of people around the world.
From the book, "The Making of Bigfoot" by Greg Long. You can purchase it here.
"He who seeketh long enough and hard enough will find the truth, whatever that truth may be." Roger Patterson, Do Abominable Snowmen of America Really Exist?
In Tibet, they call him Yeti. In Russia, Almas. In China, Yeren. The Australians report the Yowie. From Malaysia and Indonesia come sightings of the Orang Pendek. In the United States, the Indians of the Great Northwest call him Sasquatch. To most of us, he is simply Bigfoot, a huge, bipedal, hairy man-ape with heavy, sloping brows, a sagittal crest on its head, a short neck, and long arms. Despite thousands of witness reports, sightings, and castings of Bigfoot tracks, the mysterious creature remains elusive. No bones or carcass of a Bigfoot has ever been found. Bigfoot, it seems, can never be killed or captured, only glimpsed.
These giant, hairy monsters grip the imagination of millions of people around the world. But do the monsters exist?
A surprisingly large number of people think so. Many of them base their be-lief on a single piece of evidence: a short, sixty-second strip of sixteen-millimeter color film allegedly taken of a Bigfoot on October 20, 1967, near Bluff Creek in Northern California. The photographer was Roger Patterson of Yakima, Washington. With Patterson that day was his sidekick, Bob Gimlin, also from Yakima.
For more than thirty-five years avid Bigfoot believers have embraced the Patterson film as the gospel truth. In fact, the "Bigfoot community" considers the film the "gold standard" of all Bigfoot evidence, "proving" the existence of Big-foot. No other piece of evidence exists, they contend, which is as compelling, convincing, and indisputable. No human being, they say, could have constructed a costume with as many subtle and incomparable Bigfoot features as those of the Bigfoot in Patterson's footage. For years, numerous statements, articles, and reports have been issued by the believers insisting that the creature in Patterson's film is of an undiscovered, unknown animal—a real Bigfoot.
I have a deep and abiding interest in contemporary stories of "unexplained mysteries," and for more than twenty-five years have investigated and studied such phenomena as UFOs, famed Northwest pilot Kenneth Arnold's sighting of nine flying saucers near Mount Rainier in Washington, orange balls of light, mysterious sounds, apparitions, and a wide variety of purportedly unusual experiences that don't fit any familiar category.
Let me state for the record that I am open to many ideas, theories, and possibilities. The world is, as I have personally discovered, far stranger than we think, and every day we find new surprises and startling new discoveries. How-ever, I am also committed to the practice of science and critical thinking as tools to help us understand ourselves and our universe.
As a resident of the beautiful Pacific Northwest since 1978, I have found it impossible to avoid the stories of Bigfoot that are endemic to the region. I have never thought that Bigfoot was purely fiction, nor am I a "believer." Like any good scientific practitioner I am always looking for solid, hard evidence.
With this in mind, in November 1998 I decided to probe into the Patterson film. Frankly, I didn't believe I would find much. On the contrary, what I discovered was startling. In fact, I was flooded with information just waiting to be gathered. It became evident early on that during all the years that Patterson's Bigfoot sauntered—aided by the media—deeper and deeper into the public imagination, never once had any Bigfoot "investigator," scientist, or journalist ever asked the obvious questions: "Who was Roger Patterson anyway? What was his character? What did he value? How did he behave? Was he telling the truth?"
I believe that incredible stories demand credible witnesses. Honesty and integrity form the fundamental solid basis of any claim. What I discovered, and present here for the very first time anywhere, totally shatters the conventional view of Roger Patterson, the pioneering "Bigfoot hunter," and the authenticity of the Patterson film. The Bigfoot community—small, closed, and suspicious—has carefully nurtured and protected this conventional view for decades.
Not once in the entire history of the Bigfoot field, did any Bigfoot investigator or researcher dare to ever make public the facts about Roger Patterson. Instead, the incriminating and overwhelming evidence has been purposely brushed aside, ignored, hidden, and even suppressed.
The evidence that I have gathered through entirely original research per-formed in Roger Patterson's haunting grounds, which I present here, challenges head-on a worldwide legend. These newly uncovered facts rip asunder the mask of Patterson's Bigfoot. I think you will find the facts shocking. I know I certainly did. Even a talented movie maker would have a hard time thinking up this story.
The public deserves to hear the full, factual story of the Patterson film. I believe very strongly in this, so I have let the exact words of those who know the story speak for themselves. I retain throughout the book the local dialect, inflection, and syntax of the witnesses wherever possible. These people who knew the infamous Roger Patterson tell it like it was, as best as they remember it. Editing is used only for length and to improve clarity and preserve relevance.
It is difficult to stand up in the midst of the herd and tell the truth as it is, because, in this case, it is an unpleasant, brutal truth. The public deserves it. The time for flimflam must end. The full story must be told. The task is even more difficult if you live in Yakima, Washington, and you knew Patterson personally, and you know who he really was. It's further compounded if you happen to live in the Pacific Northwest, where the cult of Bigfoot believers and promoters consistently praise and believe in the Roger Patterson film as if it were a religious icon, never wanting to discover the truth.
The fact remains, as this book proves, that the real truth has always been waiting to be revealed using basic science, critical thinking, and simple detective work.
As it will be unveiled here, almost no one ever bothered.
Greg Long
Mill Creek, Washington
November 17, 2003
From the book, "The Making of Bigfoot" by Greg Long. You can purchase it here.
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