Attacking Patterson’s “Video”

The countdown is on. Next year will see the 40th anniversary of the so-called “Patterson Film,” more properly labeled the Roger Patterson-Bob Gimlin film footage of a Bigfoot at Bluff Creek, California, taken on October 20, 1967. Expect more and more attempts to examine this episode in cryptozoology in the coming months.

Andy Kaiser, a reporter at The Grand Rapids Press in Michigan demonstrates the foolishness that still exists among the media when Bigfoot is discussed. Kaiser wrote an article this week entitled "Do Video Enhancements Reveal Bigfoot?”

The guy does not seem to have a clue about Bigfoot or even the subject of the 1967 evidence about which he is trying to comment.

Besides the premise behind the very headline being used by that newspaper, Kaiser’s first paragraph reinforces and further reveals his ignorance:

One of the more popular pieces of evidence for the existence of Bigfoot is the "Patterson Bigfoot video," which shows a supposed Bigfoot striding away from an excited and shaky cameraman, the late Roger Patterson. Taken in 1967, no other video has been held in such high esteem and presented as proof of the monster’s existence.

Okay, stop the presses there! The Bigfoot "video"? The Patterson-Gimlin footage was shot on film, not videotape. Roger Patterson was using a hand-held movie camera. Specifically, he was using a 16mm Cine Kodak K100 with a mobilgrip handle, in which he took 952 frames of Kodachrome II, of a creature we all call Bigfoot, amounting to approximately 39.7 seconds of footage. Do reporters even do their Bigfoot homework, reading Daniel Perez’s, Mark A. Hall’s, John Green’s, Janet Bord’s, or Chris Murphy’s material on the film footage, or my books, before they jump into their attempts at ridicule and sarcasm? Apparently not.

This Michigan reporter cannot grasp the topic he is examining. It is film footage, not video. Next, Kaiser demonstrates a collection of half-truths, misinformation, and outrageous non-facts about Patterson. He writes:

Since the loss of the original film and equipment and the death of Patterson, evidence is hard to verify or disprove. Never mind Patterson was a known con artist and was arrested after the video shoot for stealing the movie camera.

This kind of thinking issues from a Michigan reporter whose sense of reality exists incorrectly in an overblown thought process that seems based on too quickly and uncritically reading a confused debunker’s minor book. You won’t read the title of that book here, as it is such a distasteful volume filled with comments that verge on pure character assassinations.

Unfortunately, such printed poison spawns trivia articles as this Kaiser one where his hastily written words can’t even get it correct that Roger Patterson, of course, would not have used video in his film camera.

As to Patterson being arrested, this 2006 reporter seems to be lifting what is a minor 1967 incident to the crime of the century. Fact: The "arrest warrant", issued five months before the famed footage, was for a camera used previously, which was returned only two days late, even according to the skeptics. Fact: Patterson was briefly taken into custody as he walked into the specific camera store that applied for the warrant. He reportedly was there to return the Bluff Creek footage camera. Fact: He was almost immediately released on personal recognizance (no bail) and the charges were dropped later. But such details don’t sound melodramatic.

The facts are that Roger Patterson was served with an arrest warrant on November 28, 1967, which was issued, on October 17, 1967, before the Patterson-Gimlin Bluff Creek Bigfoot footage was taken on October 20, 1967. But the warrant was based on Patterson failing, in a timely fashion, to return a rented camera on time in May 1967. Nevertheless, this hasn’t stopped some skeptics from writing over-the-top sentences like this one: "Patterson, in fact, was promptly arrested for grand larceny for stealing the very camera he used at Bluff Creek!"

As to using the value-laden phrase "con artist," if Patterson was alive, he might be considering a law suit against the paper.

What is unfortunate about an article like this is that it has taken the passionate work of two people in two separate decades, Roger Patterson in the 1960s, and M. K. Davis, a former NASA analyst who has enhanced the footage in the 2000s, and diminished them to the usual media treatment in snippets of thoughtlessness. Kaiser sums up on February 27th his less-than-reasoned opinion with this one-liner:

To me, the "authentic Bigfoot" looks like a guy walking in a padded gorilla suit.

The article never details one item that this reporter sees in M. K. Davis’s enhancements for why he feels this way. It sounds more like pure faith in the misconceptions he has internalized about Patterson than about the footage, which has influenced Andy Kaiser.

Perhaps it is time for newspaper reporters who don’t know their video from their film to stop talking about the Patterson-Gimlin footage entirely. This one could not, for example, see the enhancements that M. K. Davis has produced, showing muscle movement under the hair, the hernias in the skin, and the reality of the October 1967 Bigfoot footage if someone gave him a roadmap.

Loren Coleman About Loren Coleman
Loren Coleman is one of the world’s leading cryptozoologists, some say “the” leading living cryptozoologist. Certainly, he is acknowledged as the current living American researcher and writer who has most popularized cryptozoology in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. Starting his fieldwork and investigations in 1960, after traveling and trekking extensively in pursuit of cryptozoological mysteries, Coleman began writing to share his experiences in 1969. An honorary member of Ivan T. Sanderson’s Society for the Investigation of the Unexplained in the 1970s, Coleman has been bestowed with similar honorary memberships of the North Idaho College Cryptozoology Club in 1983, and in subsequent years, that of the British Columbia Scientific Cryptozoology Club, CryptoSafari International, and other international organizations. He was also a Life Member and Benefactor of the International Society of Cryptozoology (now-defunct). Loren Coleman’s daily blog, as a member of the Cryptomundo Team, served as an ongoing avenue of communication for the ever-growing body of cryptozoo news from 2005 through 2013. He returned as an infrequent contributor beginning Halloween week of 2015. Coleman is the founder in 2003, and current director of the International Cryptozoology Museum in Portland, Maine.

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