I always find it interesting when people say "It looks like a man in a suit" when talking about a thing that would look like a man in a suit.
There has been some push back on these parts of Long's theory.
There are real problems with Long's approach, including irreconcilable differences in people's stories and asking severely leading questions in the interviews that border on badgering. Long took the reverse approach to a serious investigation. He began from the premise that the film was a hoax and then set out to try and prove it, and openly says as much in the book. That's not the way research is done. Long offers no analysis of the film itself and simply paints an unflattering picture of Patterson as something of a scoundrel who owed everybody money, which is pretty much universally acknowledged. The problem is that's all circumstantial, and at the end of the day the film has to stand or fall based on what it shows, not to whom Patterson owed money.
Morris offered no evidence apart from his own testimony to support his account, the most conspicuous shortcoming being the absence of a gorilla suit or documentation that would match the detail evidenced in the film and could have been produced in 1967.
Moreover, Morris was asked to produce another one like it and said he would, but what he produced looked nothing like either what the film shows or the suit he was selling. He says it was an off-the-shelf costume that was modified for Patterson. Here is a photo of Morris standing next to the gorilla costume that he was selling at the time, and the suit he produced to prove his claims. You be the judge. To date, nobody has been able to reproduce what the film shows, despite many well-funded efforts.
Long argues that the suit Morris says he sold to Patterson was the same suit Heironimus claims to have worn in the Patterson film. However, Long quotes Heironimus and Morris describing different ape suits in many respects.
Heironymous first claimed that Patterson had killed a red horse and skinned it to make a two-piece costume with a drawstring waist. You'll note that the figure in the film is black. Then after Morris made his claim, Heironymous changed his story to say that it was just a gorilla suit with football shoulder pads underneath. Both of those things cannot be true, so either he lied before or he's lying now. He also doesn't know where the film site actually was.
I've always found the fact that Patterson was trying to make a Bigfoot film prior to the encounter a little suspicious. He had been shooting and working out a story line and using people like Heironimus 4-5 months before heading to NorCal.
It might seem suspicious to some, but it makes sense in the larger context. Patterson and Gimlin weren't randomly out in the woods when the film was allegedly taken. They were following up on a series of recent sightings in the area and Patterson was shooting some B-roll footage to be used in the film. The first 2 minutes of the film consists entirely of this B-roll stuff. Patterson had also just published his book the year before, so if he was looking to cash in, why not publish the book after?
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For actors and cameraman, Patterson used at least nine volunteer acquaintances, including Gimlin and Bob Heironimus, for three days of shooting, perhaps over the Memorial Day weekend. Patterson would have needed a costume to represent Bigfoot, if the time came to shoot such climactic scenes.
This is where it gets really interesting. It's possible that everyone could be telling the truth to some degree. We know that there was a considerable bit of footage already in the can, and so it's possible that there was indeed a suit of some sort for an actor to play the part of the monster, much like Legend of Boggy Creek. Heironymous may indeed have been the actor chosen for it and is simply confused about the date and location. This would have been a completely separate piece of footage from the film we are discussing and would fit with claims that Patterson had developed a really terrible piece of film of a man in a suit prior to October. Alas, we will never know because all of that completed footage is lost.
Critics claim that too much happened between the filming (at 1:15 at the earliest) and the filmmakers' arrival in Willow Creek (at 6:30 at the latest). Daegling wrote, "All of the problems with the timeline disappear if the film is shot a few days or hours beforehand. If that is the case, one has to wonder what other details of this story are wrong." The film's defenders retort that although the time window was tight, it was do-able.
I've never understood this argument. The timeline isn't even particularly tight as far as I can tell. Listen Bob Gimlin describe the day and see if anything seems amiss.
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To my knowledge, the leader of the original film containing the date it was developed and possibly the lab that did it has never been shown. Why?
Because the camera original is lost and the best we have are 1st gen copies. At the time of Patterson's death in 1972, the original was in the possession of a production company called American National Enterprises. Patterson's estate failed to get it back after his death, and then ANE went bankrupt and the film was sold in a liquidation sale. The new owner put it in storage, and in 1980 Rene Dahinden informed the owner that Patterson had sold him his rights to the film before his death (which was true) and Dahinden was allowed to check it out for examination. It's unknown whether Dahinden returned it, passed it on to somebody else, or kept it. He was a cantankerous sort who didn't play well with others, so he never discussed it. His estate has been contacted, but they haven't found it. If it could be found there is a lot we could learn from it.
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As far as the lab goes, the lab in Seattle where Kodachrome was developed was open that Saturday but they weren't processing Kodachrome that day. Al DeAtley said he didn't want to reveal the lab because "it might cost the young man his job." Since DeAtley was a very wealthy man, it's not unreasonable to think he might have slipped somebody a Benjamin to get it done after hours.
Ultimately, it's the lack of any hard to hoax evidence like scat, hair, skeletal remains or DNA vs something like a shaky film that can be hoaxed. At least if we're talking about a flesh and blood Bigfoot.
We do have hair and scat DNA samples, but the only thing that can be said about them is that they don't match any known animal. That's not really helpful. Hairs have been identified as primate hairs but with a different medulla than humans, but again it's just an unknown without a type sample to compare it to. What needs to happen is for the genome to be fully sequenced, which is cost-prohibitive. If Elon Musk wants to take on a side project this would be right up his alley.
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