Popular Mechanics (South Africa)
Inside the FBI’s Bigfoot files
FOR THE MOST PART, THE FILM IS three and a half minutes of grainy horseback riders and jerky pans, but it’s been scrutinised for decades amid every major Bigfoot debate. Because, two and a half minutes in, the lens of the 16 mm CineKodak catches something strange.
‘We were just riding alongside the creek enjoying the warm sunshine day,’ says
Bob Gimlin, who shot the film. ‘Then, across the creek, there was one standing. Everything happened so fast.’
Gimlin’s camera sees a large ape-like figure lumbering on its hind legs across a clearing. For a brief moment, the animal appears to look at the camera, and then it’s gone. This is the famed Patterson-Gimlin film, reportedly shot in October 1967 in the forests of Northern California. It is one of the most analysed pieces of film in American history.
To some, the Patterson-Gimlin film is definitive proof Bigfoot is as real as mountain gorillas or narwhals. For others, it’s a hoax akin to videos claiming to show ghosts, aliens, and lizard people. But Gimlin, now 87, knows what he saw that day. ‘It walked upright and for quite a long way. It didn’t look like a bear. I’ve been in the woods my whole life,’ he says. ‘There’s no doubt in my mind at all what it was.’
A CENTURIES-OLD TALE
THE ELUSIVE, POSSIBLY FICTITIOUS Bigfoot goes by a number of names – Sasquatch, Yowie, Skunk Ape, Yayali – and reported sightings date back centuries across North America. Ancient stories encourage harmony with the animal, but today, organised search efforts – along with a declassified file from the FBI – could lead to more aggressive search tactics.
Many Native American cultures shared oral legends of a primate-like creature roaming North American forests. In fact, the name ‘Sasquatch’ comes from Halkomelem, a language spoken by several First Nations peoples who occupied the upper Northwest and British Columbia.
In these legends, the animals cover a spectrum of human- and ape-like descriptions. The mythology of British Columbia’s Kwakiutl tribe calls the Sasquatch ‘Dzunukwa’. According to legend, Dzunukwa is a hairy female living deep in the mountains. She spends most of her time sleeping, though she does harbour an appetite for disobedient children.
In California, there are 500- to 1 000-year-old Yokut pictographs that appear to show a family of giant creatures with shaggy hair. Called ‘Mayak datat’ by the tribe, the images resemble the common vision of Bigfoot.
‘Some tribes really love Bigfoot,’ says Kathy Moskowitz Strain, author of the book Giants, Cannibals and Monsters: Bigfoot in Native Culture and archaeologist with the US Forest Service. ‘To other tribes, though, such as the Miwoks, he’s an absolute ogre, a monster, and something best left alone.’
Native Americans weren’t the only ones who reported seeing this very hairy primate roaming the wilds of America. Nineteenthand early 20th-century newspapers had sections devoted to miners, trappers, and prospectors who claimed to have seen
‘wild men,’ ‘bear men,’ and ‘monkey men’.
The most famous among these reports is a 1924 incident in which a group of prospectors claimed they were attacked by a gang of ‘ape-men’ in a cabin near
Mount St Helens in Washington State. Later, one of the prospectors admitted the attacks weren’t unprovoked. He had taken potshots at the creatures earlier in the day.
Accounts like this have often been regarded with scepticism. ‘It’s hard to know what came out of the bottom of a whiskey bottle and what’s real,’ says former NPR producer Laura Krantz, host of the podcast Wild Thing, which examines the search for Bigfoot.
Other times, another animal would be mistaken for a Sasquatch, which might explain the origin of the ‘Bigfoot’ moniker. Newspaper accounts show that ‘Bigfoot’ was a common nickname for aggressive grizzly bears who ate cattle and attacked humans. It wasn’t until 1958, when a California tractor operator named
Jerry Crew ‘found’ a series of huge muddy footprints, that the term was popularised in reference to the primatelike animals.