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New Documentary Exposes the Truth Behind That 1967 'Bigfoot' Footage (msn.com) 16

There's a surprise in a new documentary about that Bigfoot film shot in 1967 by Roger Patterson, reports the Wall Street Journal.

Capturing Bigfoot "builds to a big reveal: freshly surfaced film that appears to show a woodsy dress rehearsal for one of the world's most enduring hoaxes." In the new footage — from a Kodak reel dating to 1966 — Patterson's camera tracks a man in costume, his brother-in-law, moving in a similar fashion to the figure in the 1967 shoot, which featured a different location and a bigger man with a more distinctive stride, according to the documentary. The test-run footage "is the work of a director with a vision," says Capturing Bigfoot director Marq Evans. He says the reel was given to him by a colleague at Olympic College in Bremerton, Wash., where Evans runs a documentary film program. The colleague found the film in a safe that belonged to her late father, who worked in a Boeing film lab and could have developed film discreetly.

With the long-buried footage in hand, Evans set out to explore the ripple effects from the Bigfoot film. Patterson, who died in 1972, hailed from the same region of Washington as Evans; the documentarian discovered that the hardscrabble cowboy had also been a gifted craftsman and artist. Patterson illustrated a self-published book, "Do Abominable Snowmen of America Really Exist?", and set out to make a wildlife movie that would feature the ultimate trophy footage. He and his collaborators inadvertently helped spawn "this massive culture and industry" around the Bigfoot legend, Evans says...

Roger Paterson presented his footage to America in a traveling show that crisscrossed the nation and climaxed with the hyped Bigfoot sequence on screen. The money poured in, leading to resentment among cohorts who felt they'd been shortchanged, none more so than Bob Gimlin, Patterson's wingman in the field during the infamous shoot.. [Roger's son] Clint Patterson says his mother privately confirmed his suspicions that the family's claim to fame was bogus, but he kept quiet to protect their financial stream. About 10 years ago, when he first wanted to go public with the truth, his mother disowned him.

Bigfoot was also a recurring character on the 1970s TV show The Six Million Dollar Man.

Which kind of puts the whole thing in perspective...
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New Documentary Exposes the Truth Behind That 1967 'Bigfoot' Footage

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  • by Art Challenor ( 2621733 ) on Sunday March 15, 2026 @10:42AM (#66042492)
    Clearly deep-fake AI footage (with a very creative backstory) designed to discredit the, totally believable, initial footage.
  • by marcle ( 1575627 ) on Sunday March 15, 2026 @04:49PM (#66043008)

    The true believers will still believe

    • There aren't believers. There are people who sell big foot nonsense and people who think it's nonsense. No one believes in it. It's not like UFOs or ghosts, tons of people of all shapes and sizes believe in those pseudoscientific phenomena. But even in paranormal/cryptid circles, bigfoot is considered a joke. A small group of grifters with ties to the entertainment industry have spend 50 years monetizing an obvious hoax. Outside of that small group of people who have a financial incentive, every single pers
  • ...he has rather tiny feet?

    • When contacted for comment, Bigfoot replied ""Look at those feet. Are they small feet? And he referred to my feet -- if they are small, something else must be small. I guarantee you there is no problem. I guarantee you".
  • Never would have believed it was a fake.

  • Always grainy footage.... Footprints proven to have been faked..... Nothing ever concrete, NEVER any BONES !
  • or international skeptic forum. Argued to death with quite a few bigfoot believer ( all of them pretending they had proof that the filmed creature had a gait which could not be reproduced by human). That should be the nail in the coffin, but as we saw even with the Shroud, believer will continue to make all sort of excuses to continue believing.
  • "from a Kodak reel" - what does that mean. A roll of Kodak film, how is that relevant.

Never try to teach a pig to sing. It wastes your time and annoys the pig. -- Lazarus Long, "Time Enough for Love"

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