-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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