Bigfoot at Bluff Creek

Patterson-Gimlin film, 1967 (widely documented)

Bluff Creek, a tributary of the Klamath River in the Six Rivers National Forest, about 25 logging-road miles northwest of Orleans, California, is holy ground for Bigfoot hunters. It was already known for giant footprints, reported in the area since 1958, when Roger Patterson of Yakima, Washington, and his friend Bob Gimlin, both former rodeo riders, rode up its east bank on the afternoon of Friday, 20 October 1967.

As they told it, they rounded an overturned tree and a logjam left by the flood of 1964, and there, on the opposite bank, was a large, hairy, upright figure. Patterson's horse reared. He spent some 20 seconds getting free of the saddle and pulling his camera from a saddlebag, then ran after the figure filming as he went. About 80 feet away it glanced back over its right shoulder, the look-back in frame 352 that has been reproduced ever since. The whole strip runs 954 frames, 59.5 seconds at 16 frames a second. Patterson put the figure at about 7 feet 6 inches; Gimlin thought 6 feet. The two had agreed beforehand that they would never shoot one, and they did not follow it far. That evening they were at Al Hodgson's variety store in Willow Creek, and Patterson drove on to ship the film.

The case was never closed. Patterson died of cancer in 1972, maintaining to the end that the creature was real, and Gimlin has always denied any hoax. The doubters have a long list. Patterson had begun filming a Bigfoot docudrama that spring, and Bluff Creek was a favourite haunt of Ray Wallace, a known hoaxer behind fake tracks, films and photographs, who claimed to have told Patterson exactly where to wait. The primatologist John Napier, who allowed that Bigfoot might exist, concluded that the evidence pointed to a hoax of some kind, a creature apelike above and human below, buttocks and all. Several make-up artists have called it a man in a suit. In 2002 the costume maker Philip Morris said a gorilla costume he made was used in the film, and Bob Heironimus, an acquaintance of Patterson, says he was the figure; his mother said she saw an ape suit in his car two days after the filming.

The film carried no copyright notice and is in the public domain. For decades the exact spot was lost to regrowth in the streambed, until it was found again in 2011.