Marq Evans's fascinating movie shows us how the famous footage of Bigfoot came to be, and reveals the tawdry family saga behind it. It opens with the shaky, grainy 16mm footage that’s the most widely viewed piece of cinéma vérité in history apart from the Zapruder film. It even looks like the Zapruder film — though the setting, in this case, is a woods, full of birch trees and sunlight and vivid autumn color.
For a few moments, the image jerks around in a raw amateur way. Then it grows steadier, and there, about 100 feet away from the camera, an ape-like figure walks along in front of the forest foliage, turning its head for an instant to look at the cameraman, then continuing on its way. This famous evidence of the creature known as Bigfoot was shot by a man named Roger Patterson in Northern California on Oct. 20, 1967.
The footage lasts just 59 seconds. We don’t get to spend much time gawking at the creature (it’s only a tantalizing glimpse), but he’s there just long enough for us to notice several things. The hair on his back looks a bit shiny.
And is it our imagination, or is this primitive creature not just walking but strolling, with a rather jaunty sense of purpose? Why did this footage possess the world? As an opening title informs us, “No one has ever been able to determine whether the film is real or a hoax.” Then it adds, “Until now.” “Capturing Bigfoot” is an astounding documentary about the legend of Bigfoot — about how it was born, how it took hold, and how that iconic piece of film footage came to be.
It’s a documentary that answers all the questions and solves all the mysteries. Unlike your typical film about UFOs, it doesn’t leave you with that vague feeling of “The truth is still out there, and I’m still not sure what it is.” “Capturing Bigfoot” shows you the truth, but what it really shows you is what that truth says about us, a society that went down the rabbit hole of wanting to believe and now, increasingly, lives there. For decades, the 1934 photograph of the Loch Ness Monster was a haunting image of a lost world.
In 1994, it was revealed that two men had created that image out of woody putty attached to a toy submarine. And in 1991, Doug Bower and Dave Chorley explained that they created the crop-circle phenomenon by going into a field and making one, in 1978, after an evening spent at a pub. As someone who’d spent many hours gawking in wonder at photographs of crop circles, I greeted the revelation of that hoax with a crestfallen fascination.
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