-Caveat Lector-
>From USA Today
01/10/99- Updated 05:48 PM ET
The Nation's Homepage
Bigfoot film sets enthusiasts at odds
BOTHELL, Wash. - In the hearts and minds of true believers, Bigfoot's
existence has long been enshrined in a single minute of jerky, grainy
footage of a startled sasquatch retreating into the upper California
woods.
But two enthusiasts of the legendary being are alleging four magnified
frames of the 16 mm footage show tracings of a bell-shaped fastener at
Bigfoot's waist. They say the creature in the so-called
Patterson-Gimlin Film can finally be dismissed as a man in a monkey
suit.
''It was a hoax,'' said Cliff Crook, a longtime Bigfoot tracker who
devotes rooms to sasquatch memorabilia in this suburb north of
Seattle. ''How can an artificial, manmade object end up on a
Bigfoot?''
The film, purportedly showing a female Bigfoot fleeing a streambed,
was taken by Roger Patterson and Bob Gimlin on Oct. 20, 1967. It has
largely withstood independent scrutiny and, for many steeped in the
lore of the man-beast, has become bedrock evidence of its very
existence.
''There's no way of really detracting from it,'' said Ray Crowe,
president of the Western Bigfoot Society in Portland, Ore. The image
captured in the footage ''has a fluid motion. It's a wild creature of
nature.''
The film is important because many Bigfoot believers compare all
plaster casts of telltale footprints against those made by Patterson
the day he purportedly filmed the creature slinking across a sandbar
in the Six Rivers National Forest.
Discredit the footage, experts agree, and the gold standard for
Bigfoot tracks will be washed away.
Crook bases his assertion on computer enhancements performed by Chris
Murphy, a Bigfoot buff from Vancouver, British Columbia, who maintains
he discovered an aberration in the footage in 1995 while helping his
son Daniel prepare a class project.
Murphy declined to be interviewed, instead supplying a written
narrative detailing his discovery.
According to that account, the Murphys used a color photocopier to
duplicate a frame of the Patterson film. Zooming in again and again,
Chris Murphy became suspicious.
To him, something geometric - vaguely the shape of a bottle opener -
seemed to take shape at Bigfoot's waist. Murphy maintains that four
sequential computer-scanned frames of the film show the object in
different positions, as if it were swinging. He theorizes something is
cinching the sasquatch costume in place.
Murphy made a clay model of the object and in October gave that and
the enlargements to Crook, a charter-bus driver transfixed by
sasquatch stories since 1957. That's the year he made a camping trip
with teen-age friends on Washington's Olympic Peninsula that ended
with telltale signs of a sasquatch encounter: a rustling of brush, a
throaty growl and an ever-worsening hallmark musk.
Decades later, at 58, spare rooms in his home are dubbed ''Bigfoot
Central,'' stuffed with photos, plaster casts and maps dotted with
push-pins that chart sasquatch sightings.
Now his hoax assertion is giving rise to a howl that would make a
Bigfoot proud. Longtime enthusiasts smell a deserter.
One recent e-mail was typical of the incredulity Crook's allegation of
a costume fastener is up against.
''Cliff, Cliff, Cliff,'' it scolded. ''That's matted feces.''
''There are two witnesses (and) there are footprints,'' said Rene
Dahinden, a Richmond, British Columbia, researcher who shares the
film's copyright. ''We've never had anything like it previously, and
anything like it since.''
Dahinden, 68, discounts Murphy as an amateur. ''He wasn't involved in
this until 1993,'' Dahinden said. ''He couldn't spell the name
'sasquatch' before that.''
Grover Krantz, a Washington State University anthropology professor
and Bigfoot expert, also believes firmly in the old footage.
''I fully accept the Patterson film,'' Krantz said. ''If there was a
fastener, it could not be seen in an enlargement. The film grain is
such that it cannot hold an image of something that small.''
The truth of the Patterson-Gimlin film remains as elusive as Bigfoot
itself. Enthusiasts such as Krantz and Crowe see the film as a
building block for their faith. And the faiths of Crook and Murphy
endure in spite of it.
Crook knows that, in dissent, he and Murphy are ''far outnumbered.''
''There's a few broken friendships because of this,'' Crook said. ''I
just figured, 'This is a search for the truth. When it becomes
something different, that's when it should stop.'''
Maybe a Bigfoot will one day view the film, Crook figures, and offer
its own disapproving grunt.
''There's just too much evidence that these creatures do inhabit
certain areas out there,'' Crook said, ever sanguine. ''Even though
the Patterson film is a hoax, it doesn't mean Bigfoot doesn't exist.''
By The Associated Press
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