Paul Vella, a forensic expert witness on computers, gave a talk at the CFZ’s Weird Weekend on 40 years of the Patterson/Gimlin film, the definitive Bigfoot film. This year is the 40th anniversary of the Patterson/Gimlin film of Bigfoot. In forty years there hasn’t been a better film, which is ammunition for the sceptics. If it’s there, why isn’t there a better film?
It’s a good quality 16mm in the right place in the right time film. To put this in context, there were over 590 drive-by shootings in LA last year, and only one of them was filmed.
The Bluff Creek sighting wasn’t a one off, there were many sightings in the area before. In 1958 there was a sighting and a lot of disturbances, huge oil drums were being thrown over the side of a gulley where they were building a bridge. Casts made in concrete by the the crew, and that’s around the time the term ‘Bigfoot’ was coined when it made the local paper.
In 1964 a forestry worker found similar tracks on a forestry road in the same area. Al Hodgeson found more prints the following year in nearby Willow Creek while hunting.
Roger Patterson died in 1972 of Hodgekinson’s disease, at the time he made the film he was in remission, but he knew he was ill. He had the reputation for being a bit of a drifter, funded by his brother-in-law.
Bob Gimlin is still alive, works in a garage in Yakima, Washington State, and if drunk will tell you about his work with stunt motorcyclist ‘Evil’ Kenevel. He made very little money from the film, just a $10,000 pay-off from Mrs Patterson.
On Friday October 20th 1967 they filmed Bigfoot at about 1.30 pm. They shot a total of 59.5 seconds of film of the Bigfoot (if we have the film speed right), part of a documentary they filmed when they had been in the area for three weeks.
They’d seen three sets of tracks earlier on the day of the sighting. After the sighting they went back to their truck a mile away to get casting material, and changed the film. A second film was lost by the BBC, which shows the tracks that they cast.
Patterson and Gimlin drove back with the truck and the horsebox. They got the film to Eureka to mail the film to be processed, and rang the Yakima Times. Gimlin rang some people over the Canadian border in British Columbia he knew, trying to get tracking dogs, they refused.
The next day it kept raining, Gimlin went to the site again, ripped bark off the trees to protect the tracks, he was ill, he’d been up at 5am and he was exhausted.
On Sunday, Patterson and his friends Green, Dahinden and McClarin viewed film over and over again, knackering it in the process.In 1967 it cost a fair bit of money to process a film, while most Washington shops closed in the afternoon. How do you process it on a Saturday? Patterson’s brother in law may have thrown money at it and got it done out of hours? The film ran out after 59 seconds, only 26ft left.
There was other stuff on the film, footage of themselves, trees, from the previous few days. It was a very sandy area at the time. You can see footprints in the film behind the thing they filmed.
There are bulging calf muscles in several frames. Gorilla suits don’t have muscles. The sand’s been washed away over the years, there’s gravel now. People still find footprints in the area, although not so many. It’s an unbelievably dusty drive from Willow Creek to Bluff Creek. It takes three hours to do thirty miles.
The first few minutes of the film is very shaky. The camera’s got no zoom, and Patterson is running after the thing.
John Green’s height calculation have used Patterson’s height, the prints, the camera angles to calculate the height of the creature in the Patterson-Gimlin film, between 6 ft 6 and 7ft.
The distance between your middle finger to middle finger arms outstretched pretty much gives your height if you’re a human.The arms of the Patterson/Gimlin film are too long. They don’t fit that ratio.
On the film you see a flexing hand – if the arms are too long for a human, how can there be a man in a suit with a hand in the glove that’s flexing? It flexes its hand in several frames.
The Kodak K-100 Patterson and Gimlin used has film speeds. He said he always used Said he always used 24 frames per second, but that after filming the Bigfoot he found it was on 18 frames per second, which isn’t a setting (16 is). At 24 frames per second, many people say the creature is moving too fast for a human.
Some surviving stills from the second reel – the one shot after the reel in which they filmed Bigfoot - show Patterson and Gimlin casting Bigfoot prints. Looks at half past five at the time, judging by the light.
Film director John Landis says what Patterson Gimlin shows is a suit made by Chambers, the make-up artist on Planet of the Apes. Chambers denied it, saying his suit wasn’t that good. Filming on Planet of the Apes finished a month before the Patterson-Gimlin film. The alleged suit would have been Hollywood cutting edge, but in Planet of the Apes there were no actual ape suits, only heads and hands.
The Bigfoot never locks his knees, humans always do. Possible bald patches you can see on the Bigfoot in the film,
Sceptic Karl Korff – claimed in his documentary, World’s Greatest Hoaxes – that Jerry Romeny was the man in the suit, that an insurance agent conned Patricia Patterson, that it was all a Mormon conspiracy to portray their version of the Bible. He says apes don’t have a hairline down his back, but gorillas do, as Vella demonstrated with photos.
Greg Long wrote a book called The Making of Bigfoot, in which he said there was a Patterson contract to make a a Bigfoot film. There was – it was a badly typed document about lending $500 to make their documentary. Patterson did work in an old ghost train before the film.
Patterson knew he was ill, but still ploughed all the money from the film back into Bigfoot research.
In Greg Long’s book – Bob Heironymous – who is supposed to be the man in the suit – describes a completely different suit to the one the man who made it described. Bob describes a leisurely five-mile drive and a dry Bluff Creek, but Vella has been to Bluff Creek and it’s never dry. Bob is just over 6ft, an not broad shouldered enough to be the creature in the film.
Philip Morris claims he made the suit, but he describes a differently-made suit to the suit Bob describes putting on.
And why, in America in 1967, would you put breasts on a kid’s film if you’re hoaxing it?
We normally see a third generation poor quality copy on TV.We’re told at the time that you’d need to have sent off the film to Kodak, but we believe there were copycat processors around that could have done it.
Cliff Cook said he saw the end of a zip on the creature in the film. It could be a clump of mud dried to the coat. The colour of the foliage in the film suggests it’s around October.
Vella first saw the Patterson-Gimlin film on the BBC in 1972 and really wanted to see one. He was disappointed that there wasn’t one at London Zoo on his fifth birthday, but he’s been obsessed by Bigfoot ever since.
Nobody knows where the original film is, there were five copies made, Vella knows where two are and suspects where the third is. The other two are missing.
Tuesday, 18 September 2007
Giant flightless barn owls of the Bahamas
Palaeontologist Dr Darren Naish was at the CFZ's Weird Weekend (August 19 2007) on the overlap between crytozoology and the mainstream. He pointed out that former 'cryptids' (mystery animals not known to science) include the lowland gorilla - a mythical creature until 1840, the mountain gorilla - a mystery until 1901, the okapi - the stuff of legend until 1900 and the komodo dragon, not formally described until 1912, but with reports collected since 1840. Over 45 new primate species have been described in the last 20 years.
Darren described some of the weird island fauna that the fossil record has thrown up. These include the pointy-head horned tortoises of New Caledonia, and chickhairnie - a group of large bipedal Carribean tree-dwelling animals like giant barn owls that could turn their heads right round, and similar flightless Bahamian running owls encountered by early humans in the islands.
Darren 'fessed up to having a collection of toy dinosaurs which he said numbered a thousand, see pictures of Darren's toy dinosaur collection here, which certainly puts my dinosaur collection of a mere 300-odd in the shade.
Weird Weekend's newest year-old instant tradition is to finish up with a humorous talk by Ronan Coughlan, which wasn't really about cryptozoology at all, indeed, it was so bizarre I don't know what it was about. CFZ Director Jon Downes rounded off by quoting the father of cryptozoology Bernard Heuvelmans, 'The great days of zoology are not yet done.'
Darren described some of the weird island fauna that the fossil record has thrown up. These include the pointy-head horned tortoises of New Caledonia, and chickhairnie - a group of large bipedal Carribean tree-dwelling animals like giant barn owls that could turn their heads right round, and similar flightless Bahamian running owls encountered by early humans in the islands.
Darren 'fessed up to having a collection of toy dinosaurs which he said numbered a thousand, see pictures of Darren's toy dinosaur collection here, which certainly puts my dinosaur collection of a mere 300-odd in the shade.
Weird Weekend's newest year-old instant tradition is to finish up with a humorous talk by Ronan Coughlan, which wasn't really about cryptozoology at all, indeed, it was so bizarre I don't know what it was about. CFZ Director Jon Downes rounded off by quoting the father of cryptozoology Bernard Heuvelmans, 'The great days of zoology are not yet done.'
Redfern on Ranton - the Man-Monkey
Nick Redfern, one of very few Forteans who makes a full-time living on the subject, gave a talk at the CFZ's Weird Weekend (Sunday 19 August 2007) on one of those 'zooform phenomena' - a term that describes animals that are way to weird to possibly be able to exist, but which are nonetheless still being reported - the Man-Monkey of Ranton, Staffordshire, near where Redfern comes from.
There are reports from England, Scotland and Wales that broadly fit the description of a Bigfoot-type creature, but these reports are 'not as straightforward as they seem' - there are weird folk stories around these creatures about ghostly attacks, disasters that they bring about, objects passing straight through them. And how come they've never been caught? Is this thing a real animal or an apparition?
Redfern has uncovered 20-30 descriptions of this phantom Man-Monkey creature from around the UK, including interviews with eyewitnesses.
The classic Man-Monkey sighting comes from 1879, when a skinny monkey jumped onto a cart at Ranton along the Shropshire Canal, at a point where a worker on the canal had earlier died. The victim of the Man-Monkey attack struck the creature with a whip, but it went right through him, as if it was somehow spectral. The area around Renton was the scene of UFO sightings in 1954, and Ranton seems to be a 'window area for strange activity.' Nearby Camelford Chase is a folklore hotspot. The local 'German Cemetery - where German POWs killed in the 1918 'flu epidemic were buried - has seen a recent spate of 'werewolf' sightings. Nearby Shugborough Hall - the name comes from 'shug', a mythical cross between a mastiff and a monkey - saw a sighting of a 'wildly running' man-monkey creature in the garden in 1981.
Also in the area is Cannock Chase - where animals have been found dead and mutilated, including dead foxes arranged in a circle among candles - there have been reports of 'animal sacrifices' and 'ritual activity.' I was interested to see during Redfern's talk a slide of BT's Telecom tower in Cannock Chase, and asked Redfern whether the electronic pollution from a microwave transmitter like this one could be somehow inducing visions or other weirdness. I discussed this with Redfern over dinner in Wolfordisworthy's Farmers Arms pub afterwards, and another area of weirdness with a microwave transmitter in the middle of it - Highgate in North London, scene of the 'Highgate Vampire' events of the 1970s, including reported attacks by ghostly entities.
I later ran microwave towers as a possible hallucination generator past my brother, who has a civil service background. He commented, 'Sigh. Done to death, at length. Call the press officer at the Radio Communications
Agency. There is lots of data on the harmlessness of microwaves. But it doesn't matter what us scientists say - people will still claim that LittleJohnny is sick because there is a mobile phone antenna 250 meters from his bedroom. Mind you, the early microwave techies building the Post Office Tower (opened in 1966, now BT's Telecom Tower) used to warm their hands in the focal point of the beams...'
Nick Redfern's latest book, Man-Monkey: In search of the British Bigfoot, is published by CFZ Press.
There are reports from England, Scotland and Wales that broadly fit the description of a Bigfoot-type creature, but these reports are 'not as straightforward as they seem' - there are weird folk stories around these creatures about ghostly attacks, disasters that they bring about, objects passing straight through them. And how come they've never been caught? Is this thing a real animal or an apparition?
Redfern has uncovered 20-30 descriptions of this phantom Man-Monkey creature from around the UK, including interviews with eyewitnesses.
The classic Man-Monkey sighting comes from 1879, when a skinny monkey jumped onto a cart at Ranton along the Shropshire Canal, at a point where a worker on the canal had earlier died. The victim of the Man-Monkey attack struck the creature with a whip, but it went right through him, as if it was somehow spectral. The area around Renton was the scene of UFO sightings in 1954, and Ranton seems to be a 'window area for strange activity.' Nearby Camelford Chase is a folklore hotspot. The local 'German Cemetery - where German POWs killed in the 1918 'flu epidemic were buried - has seen a recent spate of 'werewolf' sightings. Nearby Shugborough Hall - the name comes from 'shug', a mythical cross between a mastiff and a monkey - saw a sighting of a 'wildly running' man-monkey creature in the garden in 1981.
Also in the area is Cannock Chase - where animals have been found dead and mutilated, including dead foxes arranged in a circle among candles - there have been reports of 'animal sacrifices' and 'ritual activity.' I was interested to see during Redfern's talk a slide of BT's Telecom tower in Cannock Chase, and asked Redfern whether the electronic pollution from a microwave transmitter like this one could be somehow inducing visions or other weirdness. I discussed this with Redfern over dinner in Wolfordisworthy's Farmers Arms pub afterwards, and another area of weirdness with a microwave transmitter in the middle of it - Highgate in North London, scene of the 'Highgate Vampire' events of the 1970s, including reported attacks by ghostly entities.
I later ran microwave towers as a possible hallucination generator past my brother, who has a civil service background. He commented, 'Sigh. Done to death, at length. Call the press officer at the Radio Communications
Agency. There is lots of data on the harmlessness of microwaves. But it doesn't matter what us scientists say - people will still claim that LittleJohnny is sick because there is a mobile phone antenna 250 meters from his bedroom. Mind you, the early microwave techies building the Post Office Tower (opened in 1966, now BT's Telecom Tower) used to warm their hands in the focal point of the beams...'
Nick Redfern's latest book, Man-Monkey: In search of the British Bigfoot, is published by CFZ Press.
The CFZ's Lake District gig
It was the final stretch of Weird Weekend 2007, (Sunday 19 August 2007), traditionally the time for the CFZ's expedition reports.
The CFZ's trip to the Lake District had not all been 'Chorley cakes, the Beatrix Potter Museum and interesting tea,' assured CFZ Director Jon Downes. They had been intrigued by a photo of Lake Windermere in the Westmoreland Gazette last year. Its photographer, Steve Burnip, described seeing something large and eel-like swimming 'very fast for over 60 seconds.' The publication of the photograph led to a letter from Mark Plant, who said he'd seen something weird on Windermere back in his twenties in 1959, while in a dinghy on the lake.
Reports from the 1980s and 1990s began to come in, with 1959 as the earliest. Local diver Kevin Boyd joined in with the CFZ investigation, doing night dives 60ft down, but he didn't see a single live eel on these dives. He did say he thought he saw a 4ft hump which he thought was a coil of an 'eel-like' creature. Boyd had also seen very big eels on previous dives.
The length record for an UK is 4ft 2 1/2 inches. There have been eye witness reports of eels of five, six, eight or nearly 10ft on various British and Irish lakes over the last 15 years.
There are two shapes of the common eel, two variants or 'morphs' of the same species. There is the round-face eel that predates on other fish, and the pointy-faced eel that eats worms. Boyd described having once seen a 'carpet' of eels in the lake, with both morphs present.
Eels are very weird indeed. Until quite recently, we had no idea how they bred. There were some tiny, leaf-like fish around called leptocephali, which we thought for years were a completely different animal, until they turned out to be the larvae of the common eel.
Lyndon Adams rang the CFZ in February. He'd caught an image like Burnip's - only clearer. In May, John Harker saw a snake-like thing in the lake leaving a wash, although the CFZ's Richard Freeman thinks his pictures show the wash of a boat.
Dr Charles Paxton says there's also a recent video doing the rounds which also shows a 'thing' on the lake.
There's a theory that there are sterile eels - called 'eunuch eels' that don't go out to see like normal eels. There's a report of a 25ft eel in the Birmingham Ship Canal in the 1990s, and a recent film of Loch Ness shows what looks like a 25ft eel. Isaac Walton, author of the classic Compleat Angler, talked about a third type of eel morph in the Thames, that had bright red fins. Could eels throw up new morphs?
In the deep lakes of the Northern hemisphere there are many stories of massive 'horse eels,' particularly in Ireland.
Then the CFZ got a report of an eel that had been in the Blackpool Aquarium in the Blackpool Tower for many years, which was over 4ft long. They went to take a look, and found - in a very small tank - a pointy-faced morph eel that was over 4ft long. It had been there since the early 1960s. They went round the corner and saw a tank with two round-faced fresh water eels that were 5ft long.
The Times in the late 19th century reported eels of 8 or 12 ft long in deep lakes in South Wales, and that 'reputable gentlemen' at around the same time reported eels giving birth to live young in a bucket.
Clearly there's a lot about eels that we don't really know.
The CFZ's trip to the Lake District had not all been 'Chorley cakes, the Beatrix Potter Museum and interesting tea,' assured CFZ Director Jon Downes. They had been intrigued by a photo of Lake Windermere in the Westmoreland Gazette last year. Its photographer, Steve Burnip, described seeing something large and eel-like swimming 'very fast for over 60 seconds.' The publication of the photograph led to a letter from Mark Plant, who said he'd seen something weird on Windermere back in his twenties in 1959, while in a dinghy on the lake.
Reports from the 1980s and 1990s began to come in, with 1959 as the earliest. Local diver Kevin Boyd joined in with the CFZ investigation, doing night dives 60ft down, but he didn't see a single live eel on these dives. He did say he thought he saw a 4ft hump which he thought was a coil of an 'eel-like' creature. Boyd had also seen very big eels on previous dives.
The length record for an UK is 4ft 2 1/2 inches. There have been eye witness reports of eels of five, six, eight or nearly 10ft on various British and Irish lakes over the last 15 years.
There are two shapes of the common eel, two variants or 'morphs' of the same species. There is the round-face eel that predates on other fish, and the pointy-faced eel that eats worms. Boyd described having once seen a 'carpet' of eels in the lake, with both morphs present.
Eels are very weird indeed. Until quite recently, we had no idea how they bred. There were some tiny, leaf-like fish around called leptocephali, which we thought for years were a completely different animal, until they turned out to be the larvae of the common eel.
Lyndon Adams rang the CFZ in February. He'd caught an image like Burnip's - only clearer. In May, John Harker saw a snake-like thing in the lake leaving a wash, although the CFZ's Richard Freeman thinks his pictures show the wash of a boat.
Dr Charles Paxton says there's also a recent video doing the rounds which also shows a 'thing' on the lake.
There's a theory that there are sterile eels - called 'eunuch eels' that don't go out to see like normal eels. There's a report of a 25ft eel in the Birmingham Ship Canal in the 1990s, and a recent film of Loch Ness shows what looks like a 25ft eel. Isaac Walton, author of the classic Compleat Angler, talked about a third type of eel morph in the Thames, that had bright red fins. Could eels throw up new morphs?
In the deep lakes of the Northern hemisphere there are many stories of massive 'horse eels,' particularly in Ireland.
Then the CFZ got a report of an eel that had been in the Blackpool Aquarium in the Blackpool Tower for many years, which was over 4ft long. They went to take a look, and found - in a very small tank - a pointy-faced morph eel that was over 4ft long. It had been there since the early 1960s. They went round the corner and saw a tank with two round-faced fresh water eels that were 5ft long.
The Times in the late 19th century reported eels of 8 or 12 ft long in deep lakes in South Wales, and that 'reputable gentlemen' at around the same time reported eels giving birth to live young in a bucket.
Clearly there's a lot about eels that we don't really know.
Dr Paxton's adjusted curve for sea creatures over two meters yet to be discovered
My own very crude drawing of Dr Paxton’s adjusted curve of sea creatures over two meters yet to be discovered, from my notes on his talk. (See here.)
Tuesday, 11 September 2007
A5 envelope shortage shock!
The sci-fi fanzine This Way Up formerly known as Antenna, has folded after many years of publication for the most bizarre of reasons - an apparent national shortage of A5 envelopes! This Way Up was posted for free to anyone who sent the price of a stamp, in an A5 envelope as it was a nice, handy A5 format.
However, This Way Up's editor John Connors tells me they've finally jacked it in, because he can't get A5 envelopes for love or money. This may have something to do with the Post Office's decision last year to encourage even less people to use snail mail by making it as complicated as possible. The This Way Up team "can only find C5 envelopes which look the same as A5,
act the same as C5 but cost more to send in the post thanks to the PO's strange charging scheme introduced last year."
John Connors' "slightly sinister fanzine empire" (TWU's own words) will shortly launch two new publishing projects and I hope to be on board in some way. Started primarily as a vechicle for long, rambling rants about Doctor Who, a programme which at the time hadn't be on TV for over a decade, This Way Up was frequently "Fanzine of the Month" in the column of the same name by SFX, Europe's biggest sci-fi magazine. I used to admire its "no editing" policy, which let people go on and on about Pink Floyd's The Dark Side of the Moon for fifteen pages and the pants Tom Baker-era story Horns of the Nimon for another ten pages after that, with an apparent decision made not to bother with any kind of layout. In an age of increasingly all style and no content, you just had to respect it's "we don't care" attitude to writing, and only writing. And then, just when I was getting tired of the no-layout no-editing policy, voila! Out of nowhere pops a layout artist and designer who does a nice job of design, layout and cutting stuff to fit. This Way Up, casualty of the national A5 envelope shortage, you will be sorely missed.
However, This Way Up's editor John Connors tells me they've finally jacked it in, because he can't get A5 envelopes for love or money. This may have something to do with the Post Office's decision last year to encourage even less people to use snail mail by making it as complicated as possible. The This Way Up team "can only find C5 envelopes which look the same as A5,
act the same as C5 but cost more to send in the post thanks to the PO's strange charging scheme introduced last year."
John Connors' "slightly sinister fanzine empire" (TWU's own words) will shortly launch two new publishing projects and I hope to be on board in some way. Started primarily as a vechicle for long, rambling rants about Doctor Who, a programme which at the time hadn't be on TV for over a decade, This Way Up was frequently "Fanzine of the Month" in the column of the same name by SFX, Europe's biggest sci-fi magazine. I used to admire its "no editing" policy, which let people go on and on about Pink Floyd's The Dark Side of the Moon for fifteen pages and the pants Tom Baker-era story Horns of the Nimon for another ten pages after that, with an apparent decision made not to bother with any kind of layout. In an age of increasingly all style and no content, you just had to respect it's "we don't care" attitude to writing, and only writing. And then, just when I was getting tired of the no-layout no-editing policy, voila! Out of nowhere pops a layout artist and designer who does a nice job of design, layout and cutting stuff to fit. This Way Up, casualty of the national A5 envelope shortage, you will be sorely missed.
Tuesday, 4 September 2007
London Underground with NO ADVERTISING! (again)
In November 2005, I photographed London Underground’s Turnpike Lane station transformed into some kind of Communist-era Dada absurdist guerrilla art surreal canvas, its platforms and tunnels hung with empty spaces where there was NO ADVERTISING. See my website gallery. Sadly, Turnpike Lane is back in full-on advertising mode. However, I recently spotted the Bakerloo Line platforms at Oxford Circus, presumably in mid-refit, also WITHOUT ADVERTISING! The Waterloo and City Line, also known as ‘the Drain’, is also free of advertising. But this is for no other reason other than that the Waterloo and City Line is officially a No Fun Zone. It exists purely to move commuter drones between their place of work and their London train terminus serving their commuter suburbs during rush hours, and the one time I used it, everyone was in a totally foul mood. The Drain has nothing to do with any possible leisure, pleasure or fun application, which is presumably why they don’t even bother advertising on its platforms or trains.
Photo: Oxford Circus Bakerloo Line platform with NO ADVERTISING! Copyright Matt Salusbury 2007
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