Samsquatch
Two men claimed to have captured Bigfoot on film on this date in 1967. Roger Patterson and Robert Gimlin were living near Yakima, Washington, at the time; Patterson was something of a Bigfoot enthusiast and expert, having already written and self-published a book called Do Abominable Snowmen of America Really Exist? (1966). He set out on an expedition to Northern California with Gimlin, an outdoorsman and his close friend, equipped with a rented 16-millimeter camera, in search of Sasquatch. They focused on an area near Eureka, California, where road construction workers had reportedly discovered overly large footprints. Sometime after lunch on October 20, the two men rounded a bend and encountered what appeared to be a female Bigfoot by a creek bed. Patterson was thrown from his horse, but grabbed his camera and pursued her on foot, recording as he went. He estimated her to be a little over seven feet tall, weighing in at around 700 pounds, and leaving a footprint more than 14 inches long.
That’s the way the story goes, anyway. The film footage has been examined and appears to be real, but most scientists have ruled it to be real footage of a human in a custom-made Bigfoot suit. The Skeptic’s Dictionary entry for Sasquatch reads: “The evidence for Bigfoot’s existence consists mainly of testimony from Bigfoot enthusiasts, footprints of questionable origin, and pictures that could easily have been of apes or humans in ape suits. There are no bones, no scat, no artifacts, no dead bodies, no mothers with babies, no adolescents, no fur, no nothing. Not that there aren’t ‘sightings’ of such. There are ‘sightings’ galore.”
Patterson died of lymphoma in 1972, and maintained until his death that the film was no hoax. Many years later, though, a costume-maker named Philip Morris came forward and said that Patterson had ordered a large ape suit from him. And another Yakima resident, Bob Hieronimus, claimed that Patterson had offered him a thousand dollars to wear the suit for the film. Patterson never paid Hieronimus; another source reported that Patterson’s desperate need for money to pay for cancer treatment was what drove him to perpetrate the hoax in the first place.
