A new documentary doesn’t disprove Bigfoot — he or she could still be out there! — but it aims to upend the biggest piece of evidence that Bigfoot believers have held onto for 60 years.
Now, some of those true believers are becoming skeptics, bringing modern “fake news”-type arguments to social media, or suggesting newly discovered evidence could be an AI-generated hoax.
The Patterson-Gimlin film is instantly recognizable. Under a minute long, the grainy 1967 film shows a tall, furry creature walking on two legs through the Northern California woods. The creature turns slightly, looking over its shoulder, and then walks on. This is the most iconic footage of Bigfoot, and for decades has been the best “proof” that a large, undiscovered hominid species roams the Pacific Northwest, partly because the film has been stubbornly complicated to fully disprove (unless, of course, you simply assume Bigfoot isn’t real to begin with).
“Capturing Bigfoot,” which premiered at SXSW this month, has unearthed a piece of long-lost footage — an apparent “dry run” rehearsal of the famous film where it’s more clearly a man in a furry suit. This new footage strongly suggests that the famous Patterson-Gimlin film was a hoax.
For the Bigfoot online community, the documentary is hitting like a nuclear bomb.
In 2022, “Chasing Bigfoot” director Marq Evans, who teaches film at Olympic College in Washington, was approached by a colleague. She had a piece of old film that had belonged to her deceased father, and she wanted Evans to help her find someone to process and transfer it. Her father had worked in a film processing lab in the 1960s and was socially connected to Patterson and Gimlin.
The new footage shows a different man in a fur suit, along with Bob Gimlin on horseback, shot in a forest that looks more like Washington state, where they lived, instead of Northern California. Based on markings on the film, it was filmed a year prior to the more famous film, perhaps as some sort of rehearsal or dry run of what they’d eventually show to the public.
“I never thought this would happen in our lifetime, what Marq Evans has come up with in the documentary,” said Joshua Kitakaze, a longtime Bigfoot fan who is active in a Facebook group for Bigfoot researchers. Kitakaze stopped believing in Bigfoot years ago, but is still fascinated by the myth and culture around it.
“For many of us who were believers, whether or not you are now, it just can’t be understated that the film was the pillar, that was the cross of this religion,” Kitakaze told Business Insider. “It was the No. 1 thing.”
“I do know that I am internally coping,” wrote someone on the r/Bigfoot subreddit. “The [Patterson-Gimlin] Footage has been the most credible and clear-cut source of proof we have (had). With the supposed claim that it was just a hoax all along, I’ve found myself struggling to accept that possibility.”
Because “Chasing Bigfoot” hasn’t been widely released yet, almost none of the hardcore Bigfoot fans have seen the movie or the new footage from 1966. This is creating a confusing situation where people who are used to poring over visual evidence to prove or disprove something are forced to rely on secondhand descriptions of the film.
Evans is aware of the controversy playing out online and the skepticism among some people who haven’t seen the film — including people who think that the new footage was made with AI. “It’s almost like when ‘fake news’ became a thing, then it was just like everything’s fake news, and people, I don’t know what to believe,” Evans told Business Insider. “I think we’re in that same boat now with AI, that because something could be AI, anything could be dismissed as AI.”
Eric Palacios, who has a YouTube channel devoted to investigating Bigfoot and other cryptids, lives in Austin and went to see “Chasing Bigfoot” at the SXSW screening. Immediately after, he posted a video about his reaction — shocked. He had gone into the film believing that the Patterson-Gimlin Film held up to scrutiny, but after seeing the documentary, he changed his mind.
As one of the few people in the community who has seen the movie, Palacios’s description of it has carried a lot of weight — and made him a target for criticism and harassment from true believers.
“I don’t know if it’s changed my feelings on the existence [of Bigfoot]. It’s changed my feeling on the community 100%. I’ll tell you that much,” Palacios told Business Insider. “I was kind of disgusted the way some of these people were acting — people that you’ve seen on television, on documentaries, talking about the Patterson footage and other stuff.”
But Palacios still holds onto some belief.
“To me, I still think there’s a possibility of something being out there. What it is, I can’t say, but I mean, there’s a million reports, eyewitness reports, and everything,” Palacios said. “And I mean, if one of them is true, then it’s true. That’s the way I look at it.”
