During late August and early September of 1967, Patterson and Gimlin were exploring the Mt. St. Helens area. While they were away, friends in Willow Creek, California, phoned Patterson’s home to report footprints found in the Bluff Creek area. The tracks, which were said to be of three different sizes, had been found on new logging roads being built in the Bluff Creek region. This same area was the scene of considerable bigfoot activity nine years earlier. It was here in 1958 that Jerry Crew found large human-like footprints. Newspaper stories of this event coined the term “Bigfoot” which has now become the most popular name for this apeman.
When he returned home to Yakima, Washington and got the news, Patterson contacted Gimlin and the two men made plans to investigate Bluff Creek. They wished to find and film fresh footprints as evidence of the creature’s existence in and around Willow Creek, a frontier town that sits near the Oregon border, right in the center of the Klamath and Six Rivers National Forests. Patterson wanted to make a documentary, and rented a Kodak 16mm hand-held movie camera and purchased two 100-foot rolls of color movie film for the expedition. Patterson and Gimlin traveled to the Bluff Creek area in a truck, taking with them three horses.
Roger Patterson holds up two footprint casts circa 1968.
Patterson and Gimlin set up camp near Bluff Creek and set out on horseback to explore the area. Patterson used 76-feet of the first film roll gathering footage of the scenery to be used as a backdrop, plus took shots of both himself and Gimlin.
Not much happened for the first seven days, Patterson claimed, then in the early afternoon of October 20, 1967 Patterson and Gimlin spotted a female sasquatch down on the creek’s gravel sandbar. Patterson’s horse reared in alarm at the sight of the creature, bringing both horse and rider to the ground, with Patterson pinned beneath the animal.
Since Patterson was an experienced horseman, he quickly disengaged himself and grabbed his camera. While running toward the creature, he took 24 feet of color film footage. During this time, bigfoot quickly but calmly walked away across the sandbar into the woods.
During all this, Gimlin watched Patterson and sasquatch, his rifle in hand, in case his friend was attacked by the creature. The two had previously agreed that under no circumstances would they shoot a sasquatch unless in self-protection. The female sasquatch was estimated to be seven feet three inches in height and weigh 700 pounds; she left footprints 14½ inches long by six inches wide.
Roger Patterson’s photo of the back of the female bigfoot as it walked away.
Patterson and Gimlin decided not to pursue the sasquatch into the woods for fear of a possible confrontation with the creature and perhaps others of its kind.
The film gained instant fame. The very clear, daylight footage has been subjected to many attempts both to debunk and authenticate it. Some qualified scientists have judged the film a hoax featuring a man in a gorilla suit, while other scientists contend the film depicts an animal unknown to science, claiming it would be virtually impossible for a human to replicate the subject’s gait and muscle movement. Indeed, if it is a hoax, it is very good one.
Both men continually dismissed allegations that they had hoaxed the footage by filming a man wearing a fake sasquatch suit. Patterson swore on his deathbed that the footage was authentic and he had encountered and filmed a large bipedal animal unknown to science. Gimlin avoided appearing in public and discussing the subject until about the year 2000, when he began to make appearances at bigfoot conferences and give some interviews.
The documentary featuring the Bluff Creek footage of the female sasquatch was eventually released as a film entitled Sasquatch, the Legend of Bigfoot. Though there was little scientific interest in the film or the Bluff Creek footage, Patterson was still able to capitalize on it. Beyond the documentary, the film generated a fair amount of publicity. Patterson appeared on several popular television shows such as the Merv Griffin and Joey Bishop talk shows.
Today, still photos from the film are the most familiar of all sasquatch pictures. Entire books, skeptical and otherwise, have been written about this event. Hopefully, more film footage of sasquatch will emerge. Though, unfortunately, some of it will probably be deliberate hoaxing, part of the fun will be sifting through the video footage as it comes to us—fast and furious.
The Legend of Bigfoot Film Hoax
In 1975 an oddball documentary with a title similar to Patterson’s was released: The Legend of Bigfoot by the famous hunter and trapper Ivan Marx. The Legend of Bigfoot is a unique film by all standards. It is, allegedly, the true story of Ivan Marx, a professional tracker, who becomes obsessed by bigfoot and sets out to film, capture and/or kill a bigfoot.
The film starts with a shot of Marx in his signature red flannel shirt, introducing himself and his topic. Apparently shot in a combination of 16 mm and 35 mm film, the documentary is like an extended episode of the 1960’s television show Wild Kingdom, or some Lion’s Club presentation on big game hunting—except the quarry this time is the elusive bigfoot. But, for Ivan Marx, bigfoot is not so elusive. With his amazing tracking ability, Marx is able to find bigfoot just about everywhere he goes!
The oldest known bigfoot photo.Taken in the 1940s in the PacificNorthwest. Courtesy of Joe Roberts.
In fact, as the movie goes on, it is astonishing how Marx is able to find—and film— bigfoot from the Arctic Circle to the American Southwest. The bizarre mix of seemingly real bigfoot footage with Marx’s authentic backwoodsman style (and the gnawing sense that it just isn’t quite real), makes the film a genuine curiosity that is quite amusing. If the various shots of bigfoot in this movie were genuine, then Marx would be the most prolific photographer of bigfoot ever to live—or conversely, the biggest hoaxer of bigfoot who ever lived. Indeed, the latter is more probable. But is everything hoaxed in the film? Definitely not. Was Marx a believer in bigfoot? Well, it would seem that he did believe in bigfoot, but hoaxed film footage of the beast anyway. Either way, the saga of Ivan Marx is a fascinating story.
Marx tells us at the beginning of the film that he is a professional tracker who, working occasionally for the government, “removed” rogue animals from areas where they were presumably killing livestock and such. Marx first heard of bigfoot in Kodiak, Alaska where ranchers claimed it was killing their cows. Interested by the stories he heard, Marx began a quest to track down the mysterious beast and bring back proof of its existence.
Marx first travels to the Petrified Forest of Arizona where 700 year-old petroglyphs reveal mysterious man-like creatures with mighty big hands. Marx then finds footprints 18 inches long in 52-inch strides that could only have been made by a critter in excess of 500 pounds. The hair samples he finds nearby were tested and “couldn’t be matched with any known animal.”
To his credit, Marx uncovers hoaxes in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, and then digs in caves beneath the redwoods in northern California, and stalks the coast of Oregon. Then Marx gets involved with the famous “Bossburg Cripple” bigfoot tracks in Washington State and is able to film the “crippled bigfoot"—the first of the many shots of bigfoot in the movie.
Marx seems to have begun his Bigfoot hoaxing career with this shot of a limping bigfoot, complete with testicles hanging noticeably between the legs. He complains that the “experts” weren’t convinced, so he’ll have to go and get more bigfoot footage. Well, since the movie has only just started, this seems like a good idea. But, just how much bigfoot film footage can one man shoot in a few months? Apparently, quite a lot.
Ivan Marx.
At this point in the film, Marx treats us to some of his more normal wildlife footage, capturing a cougar (“I thought it was a bigfoot at first, but it just turned out to be a cougar”) plus other dead or dying animals that have been trapped or hit by cars... but Marx is after something more important, as he keeps telling us!
He heads up to the Yukon in his VW bug where lumberjacks show him some rock cairns that could only have been made by bigfoot because they are in an inaccessible area. Afte
r this there is a segment about the gold rush and Marx muses how the influx of gold miners must have had quite an impact on the local bigfoot population, but concludes that bigfoot must hide himself to survive.
Farther north, Marx expounds upon a theory that a local has told him that the reason no one has found any bigfoot remains is because the creatures carry their dead thousands of miles north to bury them in crevasses that open up in glaciers in the summer. He is told by the local Eskimos that bigfoot breeds in the mating grounds of the Alaskan moose. We are treated here to scenes of Glacier Bay and a glacier falling into the ocean, followed by Marx’s obligatory moose mating shots and an extended interlude of the Northern Lights.
It’s time for some more (faked?) bigfoot shots,though. Marx sets up some walkie-talkies on the tundra and waits. Then things get kind of kooky. We’re shown footage of something in the early light of dawn that Marx says is the glowing eyes of a Bigfoot. It’s odd footage, that’s for sure, though it seems like a puppet with flashlights for eyes more than anything else. Marx later confesses that it must have been swamp gas. One begins to guess that Ivan Marx is a heavy drinker, among other things.
The Bossburg Cripple footprint.
Winter is coming up in the Arctic, so Marx knows he has to find Bigfoot fast. He charters a plane and finds a young Bigfoot standing on a sandbar in a river and gets crystal clear, daylight shots of the dark biped. After footage of some hunters shooting caribou, Marx beds down in Beaver Swamp where he finds more of the giant hairy critters. This time there are two of them splashing around in the water and getting some of that famous stink off of themselves.
With that, the film winds up as best it can, and Marx seems satisfied at last with the evidence for bigfoot that he has presented. Thank God he never shot one of the beasts, though the film has plenty of animal gore and death in it. What is particularly captivating about the movie is that Marx seems so genuine in his demeanor and in his earnestness to capture bigfoot, yet the hoax is so blatantly apparent. It’s like Marlin Perkins in the aforementioned Wild Kingdom drinking a bottle of Yukon Jack and filming a sasquatch around practically every corner of the woods he stumbles upon.
One of Ivan Marx´s photos of bigfoot.
As the movie ended (for the third time) I sat in my living room slack-jawed and speechless, with the remote control resting motionless in my hand. I had frozen the film a number of times, and had laughed myself silly at Marx’s gleeful propensity for splicing stock animal carnage footage (no doubt his own) in with his faked bigfoot shots.
But who was Ivan Marx? A complete hoaxer who was cashing in on the 60s-70s bigfoot craze? A backwoodsman who believed in bigfoot, but liked to take the piss out of the gullible public? Was he mad at other sasquatch researchers and “experts” who scorned him? Was he “anything-for-a-buck” Ivan Marx, or really a serious researcher into bigfoot who decided to perpetrate a few (or many, as the case may be) hoaxes? Later in his life Marx even to claimed that a bigfoot attacked him. Naturally, he got film footage of that, too.
Ivan Marx: Bigfoot Hunter
As alluded to above, Marx’s big break was the sensational discovery of a set of highly unusual giant footprints that became known as the Bossburg Cripple footprints, named after the area of Washington State where they were found. The Bossburg Cripple footprints were first discovered in October 1969 by a local butcher named Joe Rhodes. The sighting was reported to Ivan Marx, whose interest in the sasquatch was well known, and who happened to live in the area. Marx made casts of the footprints. Subsequently, in the same area, Marx and the Canadian sasquatch researcher Rene Dahinden discovered a set of tracks and followed them for half a mile. Dahinden told researcher Dr. John Napier that he had counted 1,089 prints in all. The remarkable feature of the Bossburg tracks to Napier, Dahinden and Marx was that the sasquatch had a deformed right foot.
Said Dr. Napier on examining the casts:
The left foot appears normal, and in every respect is similar to a modern human foot— simi-lar, that is, until one considers the matter of size. The Bossburg tracks, large even for a Sasquatch, measure 17-1/2 inches by 7 inches. Apart from satisfying the criteria established for modern human-type walking, the Bossburg prints have, to my way of thinking, an even greater claim to authenticity. The right foot of the Bossburg Sasquatch is a club-foot, a not uncommon abnormality that labors under the technical name of talipes-equino-varus. The forepart of the foot is twisted inwards, the third toe has been squeezed out of normal alignment, and possibly there has been a dislocation of the bones on the outer border (but this last feature may be due to an imperfection in the casting technique). Club-foot usually occurs as a congenital abnormality, but it may also develop as the result of severe injury, or of damage to the nerves controlling the muscles of the foot. To me, the deformity strongly suggests that injury during life was responsible. A true, untreated, congenital talipes-equino-varus usually results in a fixed flexion deformity of the ankle in which case only the forepart of the foot and toes touch the ground in normal standing. In these circumstances the heel impression would be absent or poorly defined; but in fact the heel indentation of the sasquatch is strongly defined. I conclude that the deformity was the result of a crushing injury to the foot in early childhood.
Marx had earlier accompanied Texas oil millionaire Tom Slick on some of his bigfoot expeditions, and was trusted by many of the early researchers in the field. In 1959, Slick financed the Pacific Northwest Expedition, a group of “professional bigfoot hunters” including Bob Titmus, Rene Dahinden, John Green and Ivan Marx. This seems to be Ivan Marx’s first foray into the world of professional sasquatch investigation.
Marx’s early career does not seem to be marked with hoaxes. Nor were the Bossburg Cripple footprints thought at all to be a hoax—then or now. On the possibility of the Bossburg Cripple footprints being hoaxed by someone, Dr. Napier said, “It is very difficult to conceive of a hoaxer so subtle, so knowledgeable—and so sick—who would deliberately fake a footprint of this nature. I suppose it is possible, but it is so unlikely that I am prepared to discount it.”
Marx, however, apparently decided to go into the bigfoot hoaxing business after this discovery. The reason for this seems to be money. Dahinden returned to Vancouver but was in regular telephone contact with Marx; it seemed that every time he called, Marx had found something—a handprint here, a footprint there, signs of an unusually heavy creature bedding down in the bush— always something to keep the trail warm. Marx was hot on the trail of sasquatch!
Marx phoned Dahinden one evening in October 1970 and proclaimed, “I’ve got a film of the cripple.” The details of the filming were reported in the Colville Statesman Examiner under the byline of Denny Striker:
On the night of Oct. 6 an unidentified person called the Marx home, leaving a vague message that either a car or a train had struck a large upright creature on the highway about seven miles north of Bossburg. Marx was away at the time but when he received the message... he left immediately for the area with a hunting dog he hoped would follow the spoor of the sasquatch, if indeed that was what it actually was.
Marx was armed with nothing more than a Bolex 16mm movie camera with a 17mm lens, a 35mm Nikon and a two-way radio with which he had contact with rancher Don Byington, who was in the area by the time Marx’s dog had located the creature.
The day was heavily overcast with smoke... when Marx jumped the creature in the bottom of a dense draw and began filming. The initial footage shows a large black upright figure moving stealthily but rapidly through the dense growth, but only in silhouette.
Marx pressed the pursuit with his hound, forcing the sasquatch into a clearing where, with his movie camera set at f2.8 he took the remarkably clear footage of an impressive looking creature. On the screen the sasquatch is shown moving from right to left at an angle of about forty-five degrees away from the photographer. Distance from the subject according to Marx ranged from twenty-five feet to more than a hundred feet as it made its way into the h
eavy underbrush on the far side of the clearing.
Probably the most impressive part of the film, besides its extreme clarity, is the fact that the sasquatch is visibly injured, holding its right arm tightly to its chest and using its long muscular left arm for compensating balance. Also, both ankles of the creature seem badly skinned, the wounds showing plainly raw against the black hair of the legs and feet.
One of Ivan Marx’s photos of bigfoot—a hoax?
The story was released to the wire services and the second siege of Bossburg, Washington, was underway. Film producers made offers for the film and author Ivan T. Sanderson phoned on behalf of Argosy Magazine. He offered to buy the serial rights to the story, as he had done with Roger Patterson’s famous 1968 film footage.
Then appeared on the scene Peter Byrne, who had been part of some Tom Slick-sponsored expeditions in the Himalayas and northern California. Tom Slick had died in a plane crash a decade before, but Byrne still had a source of financing. He and Marx came to an arrangement: Marx would be paid a monthly retainer of $750 as a sasquatch hunter, and his film would be placed in Byrne’s safety-deposit box as security. This arrangement carried through to the spring of 1971, Marx being comfortably subsidized to pursue his hunting while at the same time having to make no commitments about the film. But Peter Byrne was considerably less gullible than he might have seemed. The young son of rancher Byington insisted that he knew exactly where the film had been shot, and Byrne listened to him. The child led him and a group of investigators to a spot at the back of the Byington property immediately recognizable as the film site. Ivan’s footage was clearly a hoax.
Peter Byrne and The Bigfoot Project
Peter Byrne, the former head of The Bigfoot Project, had this to say about Ivan Marx in 2003:
Yeti, Sasquatch & Hairy Giants Page 18