Edition 73 - Bigfoot
US investigator Jeff Hilling about the world’s most notorious and controversial sighting ofBigfoot…
US investigator Jeff Hilling about the world’s most notorious and controversial sighting ofBigfoot…
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Across the UK, across continental North America and around the world on the internet, by webcast and by podcast, my name is Howard Hughes and this is The Unexplained. | |
Thank you for returning to the show. | |
Thank you very much for all the emails that you've been sending through. | |
And if I sound just a little bit throaty at the moment, it's just because there's a bit of a bug going around London at the moment. | |
Everybody seems to have it. | |
And I think it's just kind of affecting me slightly. | |
Maybe it's making me a little bit more Barry White. | |
I don't know. | |
But we'll persevere. | |
It's the beginning of December. | |
It's a beautiful day in London too. | |
I'm looking up out of a window here where I'm recording this at a lovely clear blue late afternoon sky. | |
And the sun is hanging in the air at kind of mid-level, very low in the sky because it's December in the northern hemisphere. | |
That means that it's winter time and that's what happens. | |
But it's a beautiful day. | |
We've had some strange weather. | |
I know I keep on saying that like a stuck record, but we have, you know, we had that day of 30 degrees, a couple of days of 30 degrees back in October. | |
And during November, we had some days of 17 degrees Celsius, 63 Fahrenheit. | |
At the moment, we've got temperatures around about 55 degrees Fahrenheit, which is what's doing the conversion. | |
I've done weather forecasts on radio for years, 13 Celsius. | |
And that's way warmer than December really ought to be. | |
So, as I say, something is going on with our weather. | |
And it's having consequences too. | |
On the news yesterday in the UK, I reported that a lot of areas are headed for very, very serious droughts as we go into 2012 because we've had such a dry year. | |
And because the forecasters are saying that it looks like we're going into a dry winter, the reservoirs here that store the water are not getting replenished. | |
And it's all to do with the jet stream, because the jet stream is taking the dampness and the rain way north. | |
And that's meant recently that Glasgow, Scotland and Belfast in Northern Ireland have had floods. | |
Whereas Essex and Sussex down here in the southeast of England have been really dry. | |
That's a problem. | |
There's a reservoir called Ardingley. | |
It's at a place called Arding Lai in Sussex, where they hold the South of England Agricultural Show every year. | |
Lovely area. | |
And that reservoir is only at 12% of capacity. | |
I was reporting on the news yesterday. | |
And that is disastrous because it's December and we should have had rain. | |
And not only is the soil dry, but the subsoil underneath it is dry too. | |
So that's like one problem compounding another. | |
That's a massive problem for food. | |
You know, farmers are not going to find it easy. | |
But a massive problem down the track for all of us unless we get some rain. | |
Who knows what's going to happen. | |
If the weather follows the pattern of the last few years, then here in London, we're probably going to have a really cold spell towards Christmas time. | |
We might well have snow, and there are some predictions of that, but I'll keep you posted on that. | |
Thank you very much for all of your emails. | |
Just a very few of the people who've emailed recently. | |
Mark, thank you for your email. | |
Jan, thank you for your email. | |
Gavin, thank you. | |
Ralph, suggesting some subjects. | |
Thank you. | |
A lot of you suggesting subjects to do. | |
I will get on to those, all of them. | |
Derek, thank you for your nice email. | |
David, suggesting an archive of the shows. | |
Well, of course, David, we have that archive online at the website, www.theunexplained.tv. | |
If you mean an archive of the radio shows, the truth is that I don't have them all. | |
If you do or you know somebody who has, let me know, won't you? | |
Andrew, thank you for your email. | |
John is one of a number of people, quite a few people, telling me some sad news. | |
We replayed on the show the radio interview that I did from five or six years ago with Al Bierlich from the Philadelphia experiment. | |
A very good hour and a fascinating hour that you loved. | |
And I was glad we were able to get it back again. | |
Thank you to Patrick, who kept the radio show when I hadn't got a copy of it. | |
Al Bierlich sadly passed away during October. | |
He was getting up in years and I believe in latter years he was living in a home. | |
But now some of the secrets perhaps of the Philadelphia experiment and whether time really was shifted in that way might have gone with Al Bierlik. | |
So Al, wherever you are, rest in peace and I really enjoyed talking with you. | |
And to John Jackie Ello, thank you very much for your email too. | |
Wherever you are, if you've emailed recently, thank you. | |
If you've given a donation to the show, which a lot of you have, please keep those coming. | |
They are vital to developing this work. | |
And I promise that even though times are hard and work is really hard right now, I will make the time to keep doing these shows because I love doing them. | |
This time around, we're going to get to a subject that you have suggested. | |
So this one comes straight from you. | |
A lot of you have emailed to say, why aren't you doing cryptozoology and why aren't you talking about Bigfoot? | |
And the truth of it is we just never have. | |
Never got round to it. | |
And I think maybe that's because somewhere psychologically, I have a blind spot about this. | |
And perhaps I think, nah, can't be true. | |
Well, I'm going to get on now from Wisconsin, USA, a man who is going to persuade me otherwise I think about Bigfoot. | |
His name is Jeff Hilling. | |
He's got a new book out about the Patterson Bigfoot film called The Great Bigfoot Film Mystery. | |
What really happened on the 20th of October, 1967. | |
The most famous Bigfoot case in the world, they say this one is. | |
We're going to find out more about that just a second. | |
Just to say thank you to Adam Cornwell, busy guy at Creative Hotspot in Liverpool for getting the show out to you and designing our great website. | |
Thank you to Martin for the theme tune. | |
And thank you to you, above all, for being part of The Unexplained. | |
All right, let's cross now by the miracle of digital technology to Jeff Hilling in Wisconsin, USA. | |
Jeff, thank you for coming on The Unexplained. | |
It's a pleasure to be here on your fine show. | |
You've had a lot of great guests and I'm very grateful to be one of them. | |
It's a delight to have you here. | |
We have Adam on here, all of them. | |
We've had Uri Geller and Edgar Mitchell and lots of people, David, like people who are known throughout the world and people who are not as well known throughout the world, I guess, like you and me. | |
And people who are completely unknown, but I've decided to take a real chance on. | |
And that's sometimes the most exciting thing of all, you know, Jack, that you just find somebody and they say, I'd like to talk on your radio show. | |
And you think, are you kidding? | |
And you talk to them a bit and you think, okay, I'll give you a go. | |
I've done that once or twice. | |
And, you know, it's mostly worked out. | |
But I think somebody up there is with me if you believe in that kind of thing. | |
Now, tell me about, you're in Wisconsin. | |
Tell me about where you are. | |
What's it like there? | |
It's a very wooded area. | |
It's very remote. | |
Perfect place to find Bigfoot. | |
I never thought about it that way. | |
It probably is, isn't it? | |
It's got loads of trees. | |
And from what I'm looking at, temperature charts here, it's really cold at the moment, yeah? | |
Yeah, very cold. | |
It's freezing, below freezing, eight degrees Fahrenheit. | |
I don't know. | |
Eight Fahrenheit. | |
You know what? | |
I've been doing temperature conversions on radio all my life, but I always do them up, you know, beyond freezing point. | |
I don't know what the low ones are. | |
8 Fahrenheit is probably like minus 4 Celsius, even below that, I would have thought. | |
That's hellishly cold. | |
How do you cope? | |
It gets a lot worse. | |
There's times here it gets, you know, 15 below, 20 below zero Fahrenheit. | |
And listen, we complain because the last couple of years in London and across the UK, we've had some snow, okay, and we've had a lot of ice, and we've had temperatures down to… And that's pretty cold. | |
It is pretty cold. | |
I mean, it's not as cold as some places in continental Europe where it gets down to minus 14 degrees or thereabouts, but it's pretty cold for us. | |
If you have to live with that right through the winter, I just don't know how you manage. | |
I mean, how do you go out to the shops and do things and get things? | |
Well, you muddle through it. | |
You kind of get used to it. | |
When you're born in this environment, it's kind of all you know. | |
And I've lived in the southern part of the United States for many a year too, so I know what it's like down there. | |
And it's funny when you go down there, people they freak out. | |
If it gets a little bit cold, if they get a little dusting of snow, they shut the towns down. | |
So it's kind of a unique cultural difference in the United States. | |
Yeah, you've got such a spread there. | |
And we've got the same thing here with Northern Europe and Southern Europe. | |
You know, way up north there, it's probably today, December, very beginning of December, it's probably minus 14 or so as we speak and it's late afternoon. | |
Way down south towards Malaga, southern Spain, it's probably 19, 20 degrees right now, Celsius, which is what, 68 Fahrenheit. | |
So strange old world. | |
But we didn't come here to talk about the weather. | |
We came to talk about Bigfoot. | |
Now, I've got to tell you that over the years, my listeners have been asking me, both on the radio show and on this online version, to get into this topic and do it and do it right. | |
And for various reasons, other things have come along, but also because I've got to admit that I have a bit of a blind spot about Bigfoot. | |
I've always thought the stories were just a little too bizarre to be believable, so I'm hoping that you're going to be able to convince me here. | |
And it's a big task. | |
And the first thing I did when I knew we were doing this show today was I went online and I found myself a definition. | |
So I'll read the definition now and then we can start from there. | |
Bigfoot, an ape-like creature reportedly cited hundreds of times around the world since the mid-19th century. | |
This creature is variously described as standing 7'10, 2 to 3 meters, tall and weighing more than 500 pounds, 225 kilograms, with footprints of 17 inches, 43 centimeters long. | |
That sounds too big to be true. | |
Tell me why it might not be. | |
Well, we've been seeing and hearing reports about Bigfoot since the mid-1800s. | |
Various places, diverse locations throughout the world, including obviously North America, but Australia, parts of Russia, China, India. | |
We hear of creatures like this all over the world. | |
And we've been getting reports in the news since the mid-1800s. | |
There's even an account where President Teddy Roosevelt, American president, saw an alleged Bigfoot. | |
So these things really run the gamut of location and diverse people have claimed to have seen this creature as well. | |
All right. | |
So we're talking about something very big, presumably something very hairy, and something that is even in the United States. | |
And again, I find it really very, very hard to believe. | |
It stretches credulity to believe that something like that could exist in a nation of 300 million people. | |
How can that be? | |
Well, the United States has a lot of people, but we also have a lot of land. | |
And a lot of our populations are very concentrated in cities and suburban areas. | |
There are still vast stretches of land that are unexplored. | |
And even though they're relegated to state parks and wildlife areas and whatnot, a lot of these areas, even though there are people who might go and visit some of these state parks and national forests and national parks, they see basically what is on the beaten path. | |
When you go to these Yosemite National Parks, people don't wander off into the vast stretches of thicket and forest land. | |
What they do is they stay on the path. | |
So we have a lot of unexplored area, even within our park systems, because people only go where they want to go. | |
It's kind of the path of least resistance. | |
Which I guess you would do. | |
I certainly would if I was visiting because I wouldn't know any better. | |
You would stay on the path because you want to be safe. | |
But that is assuming two things, that everybody's going to stay on the path and that Bigfoot, if Bigfoot exists, will keep away from the path. | |
But sometimes that doesn't happen and the two converge and that's how we get these sightings. | |
Is that what we're getting around to here? | |
Yes, exactly. | |
You know, I live in a very forested area myself and I go out on hikes all the time. | |
Now, I don't usually try to forge and blaze a new trail, basically. | |
I stay where the beaten path is. | |
And that's just human nature. | |
And so it is possible that there are elusive creatures out there. | |
In fact, we study, we hear about new discoveries all the time. | |
In the past 200 years, you can almost look at every single year where we've had brand new discoveries of creatures that we didn't know existed. | |
And that's a fact. | |
I mean, even in the oceans a few years ago, it's probably 10 years ago now, somebody will tell me. | |
But a creature that we thought in the ocean had disappeared thousands of years ago called the coelacanth, probably tens of thousands of years ago, suddenly off South America, somebody finds one. | |
So we're not as clever as we think we are. | |
No, we're not. | |
People who call themselves scientists sometimes get a big head and they think they know everything. | |
We don't know everything. | |
In fact, back in the 1800s, there was a mysterious hairy creature of myth, folklore that people thought didn't really exist. | |
And it turns out that it did. | |
And that creature is the gorilla. | |
And it's a very mysterious story, the story of the first gorilla. | |
I've never even thought about the first gorilla. | |
I suppose there must have been the first discovered gorilla. | |
We must have found them somewhere sometime, but I've never given it any thought. | |
Tell me the story. | |
Well, basically, it's a very unique story, and it actually has ties to the UK there. | |
Back in 1855, there was a menagerie traveling around Womwell. | |
Are you familiar with Womwell's traveling menagerie? | |
No, I must look it up. | |
Wombwell. | |
Is that Wombwell or yeah, Womwell, I believe. | |
Yeah, yeah. | |
Okay, I think that's a place on the Midlands in England. | |
Okay. | |
Yeah, and basically what happened was there was a creature in Africa that people, hunters, explorers, people of the world who went on safaris at that time heard about. | |
And they saw this creature in the jungles. | |
And it was only known to natives at the time, natives of Africa. | |
And they led a couple explorers in there. | |
And basically at some point, a gorilla, I'm going to just give you a very condensed version of this story. | |
You should look it up online though. | |
People are interested in this. | |
It goes back to 1855 where there was a traveling menagerie and they thought it was just a monkey. | |
Now monkeys were very interesting in these traveling menageries, but this was an odd monkey. | |
And it turned out that it was the first gorilla that had ever made it back from Africa to the Western world, basically. | |
So it was in England. | |
It was being toured around as a very strange kind of monkey, but it was actually a gorilla. | |
It was a baby gorilla, so that's what kind of threw people off. | |
It turned out it died a few years later. | |
But the thing wore clothes. | |
It had a pet. | |
It had its own little room and everything. | |
It was kind of a crazy story. | |
But it was a gorilla in our midst without people actually realizing what it was. | |
It was a very unique story. | |
And then from there on out, we learned how to transport these creatures. | |
They actually put these things in, they would take these gorillas. | |
They didn't care back then. | |
It was just a kind of a sideshow thing. | |
They would take these gorillas and they didn't care if they were alive, dead, if they were bones. | |
They didn't care if it was the hide. | |
They just wanted these things as an attraction. | |
So they would put them in basically a barrel of rum and they would transport them on cargo ships because it was a long trip. | |
These things, they were dead, obviously. | |
And they would bring them back and these things didn't preserve well. | |
But people had such a fascination with them back then that they were willing to pay the fee to see these sideshow entities known as gorillas. | |
So what's the connection between that? | |
I may be being very dense here, but between that and the story of Bigfoot, how does that tell you? | |
Well, it's kind of an instance where people didn't know that this creature really existed. | |
People thought it was a mythical beast. | |
And once it was brought to light, it changed everything. | |
Now the gorilla can go see them anywhere, and they're just as common as anything. | |
All right. | |
Here we're coming, actually, to my problem with Bigfoot stories, that we are a technological society. | |
You know, we can get to most places, although many parts of the U.S., as you say, are unexplored. | |
But, you know, we can get to them if we want to go there sometime. | |
We have a great, vast bank of knowledge. | |
We can look at the planet from space. | |
And yet these things are virtually, but not entirely, unknown to us. | |
How can they coexist with us and have coexisted with us for such a long time without us knowing so much more about them than we do? | |
Well, like I said, every year we're discovering new creatures. | |
Whether it's in the ocean, whether it's just varieties of a species, we're still making new discoveries. | |
And you can look that up online too. | |
There's a large list. | |
And a lot of times we're not aware. | |
We're so busy with our lives we don't even pay much attention to all the discoveries that are going on within the animal kingdom that we didn't even know existed. | |
This is still going on to this day. | |
And I'm not saying here to prove that Bigfoot exists so much as I am to just give you the mystery and also to talk about the history of it too. | |
This is a history that's very rich. | |
Whether or not it's real, we don't know. | |
This could, I don't discount this could be the biggest snipe hunt in the world, the world's greatest delusion, in a sense. | |
But if it is a hoax or worse, if it's a delusion, then it's one that's been pretty consistent and reading back, as you've done, goes back in a couple of hundred years. | |
Yeah, that's what's so intriguing about it, is there's a common thread between a lot of these stories. | |
And it goes from the American Indians. | |
A lot of American Indians report this creature. | |
And some of them even claim to be a lost tribe of Indian. | |
Right. | |
And that's amazing. | |
It's possible. | |
I mean, are these just feral human beings with a lot of hair? | |
We don't know. | |
Are these wild men living in the woods? | |
And we've got to remind ourselves all the time that the United States of America was colonized by us guys from over here comparatively recently. | |
Oh, absolutely. | |
We're only a few hundred years old, basically three, 400 years old when it gets down to it. | |
So who are we to be arrogant enough to say that after just a couple of hundred years of being in a place that we know everything about it? | |
Of course we can't. | |
Whatever technology we might have evolved and however clever we might think we are, we've only been there for the blink of an eye, really. | |
Exactly. | |
And we also don't know how many, if these creatures Do exist, we do not know how many of them there are or were. | |
There doesn't have to be, they don't have to be that prolific. | |
It's possible that what we see in the 1967 film of Bigfoot that Roger Patterson captured, is it possible that that may be one of the last creatures that ever existed? | |
Okay, I want to get you onto that because that's what your new book is about. | |
Of course, we'll talk about that. | |
As far as you're aware, what is the first recorded sighting of Bigfoot? | |
Well, we have really the best and the only original first piece of footage I would say that has any credibility would be the Patterson film. | |
That was shot on 16 millimeter film, analog film, Kodak brand. | |
And that's 1967, right? | |
Yes. | |
And that was in an age when the technology was almost, it wasn't new, obviously. | |
People have been making movies since the 1900s, early 1900s, but it was getting to the point where people could obtain cameras if they wanted. | |
In other words, you could go rent a camera. | |
That was the medium of the day. | |
That was our digital camera of the day. | |
Not quite, as you say, the digital boom that we've got right now where the technology is really easy and cheap. | |
But I remember my dad, he bought a Super 8 Cine camera and Kodak Film, and suddenly, there we were. | |
We were in the movies. | |
Yeah, it's really a good medium, too. | |
And I almost really hate to see it go obsolete, which it has, because it is such good quality. | |
It's actually better quality than what we're using today in a lot of senses. | |
Now, what we're using today is cheap, easy, quick, convenient by far. | |
But the problem with the medium we're using nowadays with digital technology, cell phone cameras, camcorders, is they can't be analyzed much further. | |
And that's where it differs between what the era where Roger Patterson captured this creature on 16mm film versus some of the things you see nowadays. | |
When you go online, you can watch Bigfoot films, alleged news sightings, people capture something on film. | |
So what are you saying that in those days, it was actually harder to fake? | |
And I think that's true. | |
Only today, one of my colleagues at work, and I don't know where I've been all these years, but demonstrated to me how easy now it is to put together HD video on a little laptop. | |
And it's broadcast quality, and you can do anything with it. | |
You can make it show anything. | |
You can distort the picture any way you like. | |
You can frame it any way you want. | |
But back in the days of standard 8 and Super 8 Cine film, not so easy. | |
That's a great point, Howard. | |
Let's say we had a brand new piece of film footage of Bigfoot. | |
Let's say it ran for 10 minutes in length and you had close-ups and zooms and this creature was walking around doing its thing. | |
Would you really believe what you're seeing? | |
Not today. | |
Exactly. | |
Because digital manipulation is so prevalent. | |
We see it all the time. | |
You watch a commercial. | |
They can do anything. | |
They can make people fly and it looks real. | |
They can make people look like they're in a car accident when they really weren't or people get hit by something and it's they're manipulating digital pixels. | |
Whereas in 1967, not only is the quality better actually for enhancement purposes and for analyzation, but there was nothing you could do in pre-production other than basically have a really good costume or have some sort of special effects built into your costume to try to convince people that what they're seeing was a Bigfoot. | |
And from what I remember of that system that my dad had, he had an editing block, okay, a really weird thing that it was just like editing old-fashioned audio tape, which I used to do for a living. | |
And you could do a little bit of cutting and you could cut sequences together and backwards and forwards and stuff like that, but it always looked dreadful. | |
And it was far better just, you know, pointing, shooting, getting the film processed and playing it back. | |
If you tried to edit it on most of that standard 8 and Super 8 gear, forget it. | |
It looked bad. | |
Yeah, you know what an edit was when you saw one. | |
And that's about all you could do. | |
You could cut and splice. | |
But another amazing thing about this Patterson film is we see that it was a one take. | |
It was shot in one take, and there was no edits. | |
It was 60 seconds worth of film running straight. | |
Tell me then about Patterson. | |
Who's Patterson? | |
And how did Patterson in 1967 come to be in a place at a time where Patterson was able to shoot this film? | |
I know nothing about this case, and I've deliberately not researched it because I looked at a list of titles in a search engine and a lot of debunkers about this. | |
So I thought, I'm not going to read about this before I do this. | |
So tell me the story like I've never heard it before. | |
Sure. | |
Roger Patterson was a rodeo writer, and in 1966, he wrote a book called Do Abominable Snowmen of America Really Exist? | |
And this was a book about Bigfoot. | |
He was influenced by Ivan Sanderson's book on the Eddie, the abominable snowman. | |
And he believed this creature existed. | |
He was a true believer in Bigfoot, and he wanted to find this creature. | |
So in 1967, since he wrote his book, he did a lot of expeditions. | |
He would go into Canadian Rocky Mountains, British Columbia area, and he would go with usually some friends, and they would try to find Bigfoot. | |
Now, there were some reports in California, the mountains of California, the Bluff Creek area, of sightings, of tracks. | |
And so in October 20th of 1967, that was the day that him and his cohort, Bob Gimlin, actually captured something they claimed to be a Bigfoot on film. | |
And he went out, he had a film, they had a couple of horses, and what they were doing is they were making a documentary about Bigfoot. | |
They were trying to find this creature. | |
And that's what we see on film, allegedly, is this man-beast, terrifying-looking thing lurking through the woods. | |
I'm sure anybody who's ever looked up Bigfoot has seen this footage. | |
This is the greatest piece of footage you've ever seen. | |
Anytime you look up an image of Bigfoot, this is from the film you see. | |
I think I've probably seen some of this on television. | |
This is this thing with a great big backside, isn't it, shuffling away from the camera? | |
Is that what I'm talking about here? | |
Is that the Patterson film? | |
Yes, that is the Patterson film. | |
Okay, I have seen it. | |
It is famous. | |
Okay. | |
And how did you come to be interested in this, though? | |
Where's your connection? | |
Well, I grew up with this. | |
I mean, at least in America, there was a lot of coverage of this in the early 1970s in particular. | |
Films like In Search of with Leonard Nimoy was a popular program back then, and they featured this film. | |
And it made its way into the pop culture here in North America in particular, Canada and America. | |
It was talked about. | |
It started winding up. | |
You started seeing Bigfoot in the tabloid newspapers. | |
You started seeing Bigfoot on shows like The Six Million Dollar Man. | |
All these programs started featuring Bigfoot. | |
So there's a natural tendency to kind of have an interest in there. | |
And later in life, about the past 10 years, I really started researching this film. | |
It was kind of in my psyche from a young age. | |
And I started researching it more and more and finding, gosh, there's a lot here that doesn't meet the eye. | |
It's not as simple as putting a guy in a monkey suit and filming it. | |
I began to realize as I did my research. | |
And I guess a lot of it comes down to researching the credentials and credibility of Patterson himself. | |
Yeah, there has been a lot of research done on his credibility and his character. | |
Some people have claimed that he was kind of a con man. | |
He owed people money. | |
He would do anything for a buck. | |
And that's a recent book has kind of painted that picture of Roger Patterson. | |
And what I did is I researched everything I could find on the subject, his character and everything. | |
And I came to the conclusion that what we see in the 1967 Bigfoot film that he filmed and his character, they kind of, there's kind of a disconnect there for me. | |
I mean, could a bad person actually capture something amazing on film? | |
And if he was a bad person, how does that still explain some of the details that we see in this creature in the film since it's been filmed? | |
We've done a lot of analysis with this film. | |
It's been digitized, stabilized. | |
It's been magnified quite a bit. | |
And we started seeing more and more details as the decades have gone on. | |
Every decade, there's something new has been yielded about this film. | |
This is the second most analyzed film in human history, only second to the Kennedy Zapruder film, the Kennedy assassination. | |
That's the only film that's been looked at more than this film. | |
And there are still even today, and what, that was 1963, the Kennedy assassination. | |
This is 2011, going on 2012. | |
There are still people asking questions and saying stuff doesn't add up about that. | |
So I can imagine that this film would equally have as many questions hanging over it even now. | |
But what are the things that have emerged recently that you think might make it more credible? | |
Well, every decade there's been new evidence coming forth, not evidence in the outer realm of this mystery, but just looking at the film. | |
Because film digitization and stabilization has recently come around. | |
A couple years ago, it was recently stabilized. | |
In other words, we see a lot of shake in this camera. | |
We see a lot of movement in this film originally. | |
But recently, they've been able to stabilize this film by overlapping frames, basically, to keep the creature stable. | |
So the motion we see is completely perfect. | |
Now, I bet that's really useful because if it was a guy in a suit, if your camera's moving all around the place, you wouldn't see the seams and the joins. | |
But if you can stabilize that film, suddenly you can look at the fur. | |
You can look at the state of this person, its skin, whatever, in greater detail. | |
Exactly. | |
And that's one of the things that we've been able to find out. | |
It's kind of like this. | |
I use this analogy often. | |
It's like if somebody passed you a $20 bill or whatever, if you looked at it, you wouldn't know if it was real or not. | |
Now, if we take it and we put it under the microscope, it will quickly be revealed to us that it is either counterfeit or if it's genuine. | |
It begins to flatter this film. | |
That's kind of what has happened over the past 40 plus years. | |
Technology has gotten so good that we've been able to do so many things with this film to see details that we never used to be able to see. | |
Back in the early 70s when this film was floating around, the best we could do was blow up the image to a certain degree with not that good of equipment. | |
Nowadays, they digitized it. | |
They've expanded. | |
They've gotten it to the point where they can actually make prints of the creature that are life-size. | |
That's how good this film was that it was filmed on. | |
And we see more. | |
It's incredible, isn't it? | |
Because I would have assumed that that film, being quite a small gauge, would be full of grain. | |
Yeah, and it is grainy for the most part. | |
But keep in mind, this creature was filmed at a pretty good distance. | |
It was about roughly 100 feet away, 30-some-odd yards. | |
It was very good for the distance it got. | |
Of course, you're going to have some grain and distortion. | |
But the thing is, what we've been able to see is as the decades have come along, we started seeing muscle movements in this creature, in the legs in particular, both in the thigh and in the calf, and also in the back and shoulders and arms. | |
These are things that were not available for us to really look into in the 70s and even in parts of the 80s. | |
These are things that never noticed. | |
So it's interesting that as time has gone on, the more technology has advanced, the more details have been revealed about this film. | |
So is what you're saying that if this was a guy in a suit, then even if the guy in the suit was trying not to look like a guy in a suit, the movements of the guy in the suit, the fluidity of the movements and all the rest of it, would have human beings written all over them. | |
Oh, absolutely. | |
Since we've stabilized it, not only do we see the muscle movements that have been revealed, but we also see something which is called gait, which is how things move. | |
How do they flow? | |
How do they work together? | |
How do animals in particular or different creatures, everybody has their own gate. | |
You have your own gate. | |
I have my own gates. | |
You know, old people have their own gate. | |
Everybody's have their own individual way of motion. | |
And I think recently we've discovered just by watching TV documentaries how difficult it is to replicate the movement of people and creatures in a precise way when we've watched these documentaries about how they make animations. | |
And the greatest difficulty that animators have, even these days, is replicating movement. | |
That's a hard thing to copy, a hard thing to fake. | |
Exactly. | |
You know, back in the 50s and 40s and 60s, especially, we saw a lot of movies that had people in guerrilla costumes. | |
You know, you watch old Three Stooges movies and Marks Brothers and whatnot, and just horror movies, guerrilla at large, things like that. | |
You would see somebody in a guerrilla suit quite often in the movies. | |
And they had specially trained actors who did that. | |
People think sometimes that all they did was put an extra in a guerrilla suit and let them do their thing. | |
No, these were specially trained people. | |
They only had about four people who they used in these Hollywood movies. | |
They used them for all the films. | |
And when you see these people in these films, you know it's not a real creature. | |
And part of the reason is the costume, but some of the costumes were pretty good. | |
But the other reason really is the movement. | |
It's the gate. | |
And they have all the edits they do. | |
They're usually not running a picture of the creature for 60 seconds straight like we see in the Patterson film. | |
They're usually doing a lot of editing. | |
And the gate is a giveaway. | |
It's the motion. | |
It's the movement. | |
That's why you know something looks fake. | |
And Jeff, how sure can you be that Mr. Patterson didn't just watch a lot of movies? | |
Well, there's a couple reasons. | |
One, the motion and the movement we see in this creature is an original movement. | |
And what I mean by that is most of the times when we see Hollywood movies or television shows where they have creatures in fur costumes, you know, gorilla-like creatures, we see a very monkey-like motion. | |
What we see in the Patterson film is completely different. | |
And I would think if somebody were influenced by Hollywood, that they would basically be mimicking the pop culture if they were going to do a fake film and try to mimic the same type of motion we see in these films. | |
That's a very good point. | |
So it would be very much of its era. | |
Exactly. | |
It was an original signature motion. | |
And I would think he'd be taking a heck of a chance trying to convince people that this monkey man or whatever roaming the woods by doing an original motion. | |
I would think he would have played it safe by going with a standard Hollywood media type influence motion that we saw in all the pictures and movies and television shows. | |
And have you talked to any experts about that unique gate? | |
And if you have, what do they say? | |
Well, I've spoken to a few experts on GATE, and I've also seen a lot of documentaries that have been done about this film and the gate. | |
They've even put people in simulations trying to replicate this gate of this film. | |
That's how far this has gone. | |
They've tried to see if a human being could physically walk like this. | |
Now, there have been a couple tests. | |
One where they had the actor in this particular documentary, he failed the test. | |
He couldn't do it. | |
He could not walk like this creature. | |
And the way they did it is they broke it down. | |
They made a computer animation model of the motion and the gait. | |
They put a bone structure overlapping the film, trying to mimic every single movement and how he had his knees bent. | |
And they said it was impossible. | |
Now, there was another one where they claimed a guy did do it pretty close, but it was very difficult for him to do it. | |
Very difficult. | |
And this was a very healthy body, not a bodybuilder, but an athlete, basically, a very athletic person that they had in this costume trying to mimic. | |
And not even somebody like that could do it. | |
He had a very hard time, and he wasn't wearing a costume either. | |
So when you put the factor in, you have to wear this gorilla suit, basically, and then you have to wear feet. | |
You know, let's keep in mind, this thing had big, giant feet. | |
You know, these are, it would be like wearing clown shoes, basically. | |
And looking at the film, doing modern analysis of it, does the modern analysis of the film tell us anything about scale, perspective, and size here? | |
Well, there have been a lot of research done on that, and that's a controversial issue. | |
It's not conclusive how big this thing is. | |
They've come up with estimates from six feet, I've heard six and a half feet, and I've even heard as much as seven and a half feet, this creature that they filmed. | |
They're working on that as we speak, actually. | |
That's one of the newest things that they're working on. | |
A guy by the name of Bill Munns, who does a lot of work in Hollywood, is doing a heck of a job trying to scientifically prove by every measurement he can find the actual size of this creature. | |
And that would be telling. | |
Because if it's bigger than a human being, or if it's just a tall human being, you know, six and a half, seven and a half feet tall, I would say it's probably a creature because especially back in the late 60s, you didn't see a lot of really tall people. | |
They're not as prolific as nowadays. | |
A lot of that's absolutely true because as nutritions got better, then succeeding generations Are getting taller and taller and taller. | |
Exactly. | |
Six foot tall back in 67 was pretty tall. | |
Six foot two was very tall. | |
Six foot five was almost unheard of. | |
Seven feet was, you know, you're looking at Carnival Sideshow at that point. | |
Okay, so there is some research being done about that. | |
Listen, I should have asked you before now, and let's do it. | |
Patterson himself, what became of Patterson? | |
Well, he died a few years later of Hodgkin's lymphoma cancer. | |
So I believe that was in 73. | |
And before that, basically from when he made this film in late 1967 until his demise, he took this film around. | |
He was trying to show it to scientists. | |
He showed it to a lot of people, just trying to get interest. | |
And it really didn't get much interest at first. | |
This film didn't take off until really after his death. | |
But what he would do is he would shop this film around. | |
He'd charge people $1.50 at the time to go and see his film. | |
He'd set up little grassroots efforts, movies in high school gyms, junior high school auditoriums, small theaters, anywhere he could set up chairs and bring his film projector and show the film and charge a mission. | |
Which sounds really quaint and old-fashioned by our standards, but of course, you've got to remember that even 40 years ago, there was no internet. | |
If you want to get yourself on television, well, even in the USA, we've got lots of television stations, radio stations, getting yourself media coverage, not easy. | |
No, the whole thing was completely grassroots. | |
And he tried to get interest in it, and he got some interest. | |
And really after his death, a couple television shows picked it up and started going with the picture. | |
Now, he had been on a couple TV shows himself, the Joey Bishop show he was on. | |
He was on the Merv Griffith show doing interviews, and I believe he aired the film too. | |
But it wasn't until shows like In Search of, and there was a, Peter Graves did a fabulous show called Mysterious Monsters, which was a documentary. | |
And then there was a film that came out, too, in the mid-70s called The Legend of Boggy Creek that really got people's interest in Bigfoot. | |
Because the first thing I'd want to do, if I was a serious researcher, if I had a TV budget behind me, I'd certainly do it. | |
I'd want to go back to the location, try and replicate the conditions, and try and find Bigfoot's relatives now. | |
Yeah, and there are people who go on expeditions all the time around here. | |
Bigfoot, the topic, has actually become very popular again here in America. | |
There's a lot of television shows who devote themselves to finding Bigfoot. | |
Which takes us round in a big full circle, doesn't it, to the beginning? | |
It does. | |
Because if there is such an incentive... | |
If there is such an incentive to prove this thing, you hit the jackpot if you prove it exists. | |
I'm surprised that nobody's done it in these intervening 40 years. | |
It's a long time. | |
One of the problems I think nowadays, too, is people are going about it the wrong day, the wrong way. | |
What I'm going to say is fairly controversial, but if you want to prove Bigfoot exists, the only way you're going to do it is by getting one, whether it's alive or dead. | |
Film is no proof of anything anymore. | |
All you're going to do is raise more questions. | |
Even if you get a very good piece of film footage, like we were talking about earlier, you probably wouldn't even believe it if you caught a very good piece of footage on film nowadays because of the fact that you can manipulate images so easily nowadays and you can doctor them up. | |
Whereas all it's going to do is raise more questions, even if the film footage is 10 times better than what we see in the Patterson film. | |
That's the problem, isn't it? | |
The jury is often left out for decades, like that famous alien film that is now very much derided. | |
But, you know, for a long while, there might well still be people who believe it, but for a long while, people thought that this really was a couple of aliens at an Air Force base lying on a gurney. | |
Yes, I remember that. | |
So that's always the difficulty. | |
And I think that one of the reasons why Bigfoot has not really played as big in the United Kingdom as it does in the United States, well, number one, of course, there's your outdoors tradition there. | |
But number two, I think we're far more skeptical here. | |
I think that's good, though. | |
I think you should be skeptical. | |
I think you should seek truth. | |
You should not want the outcome to be one way or the other. | |
I think that's where people get into trouble when they're looking into any mysterious subject, is they want the outcome to be something. | |
And so they kind of delude themselves into believing it one way or the other. | |
I'm not going to spoil your book, but what sorts of conclusions then do you come to? | |
Well, I come to the conclusion that basically I look at it both ways. | |
I look at it that if this were a hoax, this is the greatest illusion of all times. | |
And why do I say that? | |
It's because if you look at somebody like master magicians like David Copperfield, who made the Statue of Liberty disappear, I mentioned that in my book, that was an amazing trick. | |
However, it didn't fool anybody into believing it actually happened. | |
And that trick could be replicated over and over again, giving the right circumstances, the right materials. | |
David Copperfield could do this trick every hour on the hour, basically. | |
It's a formula. | |
It's a mathematical equation. | |
Whereas what we see in the Patterson film isn't as simple as people think. | |
It's not just a man in the monkey suit, because of all the details that have been revealed, such as muscle movement, the gait, the stride. | |
We see pendulous breasts on this creature. | |
That's something that is very, very difficult to replicate, especially back in 1967. | |
In fact, there have been many attempts at trying to do a recreation of this film. | |
In fact, the BBC actually did a show where they tried to replicate the Patterson film. | |
Are you aware of that? | |
I'm not. | |
So that's what they're using my taxpayers' money for. | |
I didn't know the BBC did that. | |
Well, good for them. | |
But the problem is they didn't do a very Good job. | |
They put a lot of money into this, too. | |
This wasn't a low-budget thing. | |
They hired the best costume designer there was. | |
They hired a guy to film it with similar equipment as Roger Patterson. | |
They actually used 16 millimeter film, which was good. | |
And I even have that picture on my website, Pattersonfilm.com, where the comparison, they created this skinny-looking creature. | |
And it had no muscle definition. | |
The gait was all wrong. | |
The arms were too short. | |
And this was with modern technology. | |
They didn't go back and use all the things that were only available back in 1967. | |
They took the liberties of using every conceivable advantage they could to try to replicate the Patterson film. | |
And they failed. | |
I find that quite amazing and very intriguing about this film, that many attempts have been tried to replicate this film and to make something convincing, and every single one of them has fallen flat. | |
So what would be the smoking gun? | |
What would be the definitive piece of evidence that would finally prove this? | |
Or do we have to go to that location again and find the thing for it to be definitive? | |
Well, it's difficult with the Patterson film because obviously we're dealing with history. | |
We're dealing with a film. | |
We're dealing with a lot of stories that surround the film as well. | |
But at the end of the day, I don't know that this mystery will ever fully be solved unless possibly a family member of the people involved come forward at some point with all the evidence and say, hey. | |
You know, you and I must be psychic because I was going to come to exactly that point. | |
I mean, poor Mr. Patterson died in the 70s, but presumably had relatives and friends. | |
It stretches belief, doesn't it, to think that he didn't tell anybody. | |
If it was a fake, he didn't say, well, actually, this was the greatest hoax and I did it. | |
Just keep that to yourself. | |
If he'd faked it, he probably would have told somebody, wouldn't he? | |
He went to his deathbed believing that this was absolutely real and saying that it was real. | |
He never confessed on his deathbed that this was a hoax. | |
In fact, here's a little detail I point out in my book and I'm going to give it away to you right now. | |
The amazing thing is, is he believed in Bigfoot. | |
And instead of spending money that he had made on this film, on cancer treatments, things like that, what he did is he actually became a victim of a Bigfoot hoax himself. | |
There was a guy over in Taiwan. | |
No, it wasn't Taiwan. | |
Yeah, it was in Taiwan. | |
And he claimed that he had a Bigfoot creature in a monastery somewhere. | |
It's kind of a crazy story, but this is what happened. | |
He got a letter from this guy over there claiming that he had a creature captive. | |
And Roger Patterson spent the remaining money he had trying to bring this creature back to the States, trying to find out if this was real. | |
He sent somebody over there, and it wasted a lot of his money. | |
So that proves to me that this man genuinely did believe in a Bigfoot creature. | |
Otherwise, he wouldn't have wasted all his remaining money trying to bring one back to the States. | |
Boy, I think that is the ultimate test, isn't it? | |
If you're in that situation that that guy was in, you really, it's too serious. | |
You wouldn't use all your money doing that, would you? | |
Unless you were really, really committed. | |
Unless you wanted that to be your legacy. | |
He believed in this thing wholeheartedly, and I find that fascinating. | |
So usually a hoax or something of that nature wouldn't have any real belief in this. | |
They're just out to make money. | |
They're out to put a guy in a gorilla suit and shop a film around. | |
He believed after he made that film that Bigfoot existed, and that is proof of it. | |
But he died in the 70s. | |
That begs the question, where are all the other Bigfoot films or videos? | |
Yeah, I don't know. | |
I mean, we see footage of Bigfoot, but unfortunately, because the medium had changed, you know, a lot of the stuff turned into videotape by the early 80s, and then the digital technology we have now. | |
What we see on YouTube and things like that, we hear about Bigfoot sightings, you know, I call it blob squatch, you know, instead of Sasquatch. | |
You can't make out any details. | |
It's grainy. | |
It's over-pixelated. | |
You try to amplify the resolution on this, and it immediately starts distorting. | |
And then it gets thrown into the ash heap of who knows and who cares. | |
That's why we don't have any other good Bigfoot footage, and that's why nobody really cares about any of this other footage so much, because it can't be analyzed much further than what is presented to us. | |
And it's usually obscured by trees. | |
These pieces of footage could be something real in theory. | |
However, the medium doesn't allow us to explore it anymore. | |
So, Jeff, why haven't you gone out with some modern video gear and a bunch of experts, put your house, mortgage your house or whatever, put yourself on the line, and why haven't you gone out to try to find Bigfoot? | |
That's a good question. | |
I don't know. | |
I mean, I look for him every time I go out for a hike in the woods. | |
Like I said, I'm surrounded by wilderness here, and if I see tracks or anything unusual, I'll certainly let you know. | |
But I don't know. | |
It's just one of those things that I don't know if there's as many out there as people might think. | |
You know, a lot of people tend to see them around every corner. | |
There's people who claim in research they see them all the time. | |
I've never seen one. | |
I'm a researcher. | |
I try to look at a real balanced approach to things. | |
And so if you do hear about me seeing one, you're going to know it's the real deal and it's not somebody out just trying to drum up publicity. | |
If you wanted to find one, if you felt and you had unlimited funds and you wanted to and the time and you wanted to go and find one, where would you start? | |
Perhaps where you are. | |
Well, where I am, I've actually heard of sightings around where I am. | |
In fact, I heard one locally. | |
The lady at the bank told me once that there was a lot of people. | |
The lady at the bank, okay. | |
Yes. | |
And I found that really compelling because this was something that did not make the news. | |
This was something not told to me as a publicity thing. | |
It was just a local story. | |
She had heard one of the customers came in, was talking about it as a matter-of-fact type of thing. | |
It wasn't publicized. | |
So it was a very interesting account. | |
But where I would go is, to answer your question, I would go in the Pacific Northwest, you know, California, Oregon, Washington State, the Rocky Mountains of Canada, that area, there tends to be a lot of sightings. | |
In fact, Canada, there's tons of sightings. | |
They even have a stamp, a Canadian stamp with Bigfoot on it. | |
It's quite amazing. | |
It's the Pacific Northwest. | |
What about Alaska, even further? | |
Yeah, there's been sightings in Alaska. | |
Alaska is so remote. | |
I mean, there are so few people who live in Alaska, and the people who live in Alaska are just located usually in pretty densely, well, not densely populated, but densely in relative perspective for Alaska. | |
They tend to live in the city areas. | |
So Alaska is there's a lot of that is unexplored. | |
And I suppose across the other side of the country, what about Maine? | |
I mean, that's a very vast area, very small, sparse population there. | |
Yeah, there's a lot of sightings up in Maine, in that part of the country, too. | |
And also even in the southeast, in the Smoky Mountains, such as, well, North Georgia, Tennessee. | |
I used to live in North Georgia, and there are sightings up there all the time. | |
And it's pretty uninhabited in certain parts of the southeast as well. | |
And even in Florida, there's a lot of sightings in Florida. | |
They call it the skunk ape down there. | |
In fact, there was a couple of pictures of those. | |
You can look them up online. | |
I don't even know what they call them nowadays, those pictures, but of a skunk ape sighting that are fairly convincing to me. | |
And it looks like a giant ape of some sort. | |
Sounds much more exciting than what we get here in the UK. | |
We generally get big cats here. | |
You know, big cat sightings, and then they prove that it's something that's escaped from somebody's personal collection or from a zoo. | |
You might have some feral cats running wild, though. | |
Oh, I'm damn sure we do. | |
Yeah, places like southwest of England, you know, Dartmoor, Exmoor. | |
I don't think I want to go in those places alone on a dark night. | |
Thank you. | |
England has a lot of mysteries in and of itself, though. | |
True enough. | |
So, all right, you've written the book. | |
Are you going to park it there? | |
What are you going to do next? | |
I don't know. | |
You know, I've been thinking about a lot. | |
I have a lot of interesting things I study. | |
I could go a lot of different ways next. | |
I could go, I don't know if I'm going to stick with Bigfoot or I might even go into something like theology. | |
I like theology. | |
I love studying God's Word. | |
And I don't know. | |
There's a lot of things I could discover. | |
There's a lot of mysterious people out there, a lot of mysterious events. | |
Jim Morrison, who knows? | |
Maybe. | |
I mean, look, I'll say this, and I'm not at all, in case anybody thinks I am trying to be flippant at all, but it struck me that Bigfoot is almost like, it's almost similar to the case of God, because a lot of people believe that God exists, but they've never seen him or her. | |
And a lot of people believe that Bigfoot exists, even though they haven't had the evidence or the proof. | |
There are synergies there. | |
Yes. | |
Now, I am a wholehearted believer that God does exist. | |
I've looked into it. | |
I've studied it. | |
Now, Bigfoot's, ah, you know, I'm not willing to go that far on Bigfoot. | |
I've tried to look as far as I could into it, but I'm into truth. | |
I'm not into overstating a case or understating it. | |
I'm looking to find out the real deal. | |
And Bigfoot is a very compelling case. | |
However, I'm not 100% convinced on it. | |
I'm about 70 or 80% that what Patterson captured on film is the real deal. | |
And if it's not the real deal, I would say to you that it's actually more fascinating, in a sense, than if it were a real Bigfoot. | |
And I've never thought of that, and I'm just, I know where you're coming from now. | |
Exactly, because if he did that in 1967 with Kodak film, whatever it was, how the hell did he? | |
Exactly. | |
It's actually more mystifying if this were just a man in a gorilla suit than if it were a real Bigfoot. | |
Because if it were a real Bigfoot, you know what you got. | |
Yeah, it's a mystery creature. | |
We don't have any knowledge of it. | |
But to pull off the kind of muscle motion and to modify a suit back in 1967, where there was only one gorilla suit maker at the time here in the States, Hollywood at the time was only putting out things like Planet of the Apes. | |
Well, I was going to say Planet of the Apes. | |
If you want proof of how difficult this is to do, have a look at Planet of the Apes. | |
I always used to laugh at it. | |
I'm really sorry for people who love Planet of the Apes. | |
I could never get into it because I just found it so funny. | |
Well, yeah, they put all the costumery into the face mainly. | |
The body of the suits, you know, it looked like a human. | |
What else do we have to compare of at the time in Hollywood? | |
We have Stanley Kubrick's Magnum Opus 2001, a Space Odyssey, where at the beginning they show some troglodytes jumping around in ape suits. | |
And great use of slow-mo. | |
Yeah. | |
But even those, you could tell with the gate. | |
You could tell with the, you could see the rubber masks moving. | |
They weren't perfect. | |
It was nothing like what we see in the Patterson film. | |
It doesn't look like a guerrilla suit. | |
It doesn't look like something Hollywood created either. | |
This was something beyond what Hollywood was even doing back then. | |
Even to this day, like I said, there have been recreations even by Hollywood-level experts. | |
And they have not been able to replicate anything near what we see in this mysterious 1967 film done by a rodeo rider with a 16 millimeter film. | |
Patterson, the rodeo rider. | |
What about the other guy? | |
What about the other guy who was involved in this you told me about? | |
Yeah, Bob Gimlin was his cohort. | |
He's still alive today, and he makes appearances every now and again at little Bigfoot gatherings. | |
They usually have an annual event here and there, one in Yakima, Washington. | |
And he makes appearances at these Bigfoot conventions, which are quite big, actually. | |
And still insisting that this thing is absolutely genuine. | |
Yes, he still insists to this day that if this was a fake, it was a fake that he didn't even know about. | |
In other words, it would have had to have been a joke also portrayed on him as well, which I think is kind of dangerous if you're going to have a guy with a rifle not in on the whole hoax. | |
Yeah. | |
Yes, I know exactly where you're coming from. | |
Have you tried to talk to him? | |
You know, I haven't. | |
And the reason I haven't is because there have been so many interviews done with him. | |
I have all the information, every question I could conceive of has already been asked of Bob Gimlin. | |
And you've looked at these interviews. | |
Are they consistent? | |
Does he give the same answers? | |
They're fairly consistent. | |
I mean, the only inconsistencies might be, well, how far away was the creature? | |
Well, it was 100 feet. | |
Well, you know, maybe in another interview, he said it was 150 feet or 120. | |
You know, let's give him some slack. | |
It's hard to gauge distances. | |
When people ask me, you know, I'm on the road and they say, how far away is that? | |
I can't tell them. | |
Exactly. | |
You might tell somebody one thing and then, you know, a little bit later, you tell them a few other feet difference. | |
It's just an estimate. | |
So there have really been no inconsistencies in his testimony that are worth noting. | |
Well, listen, I want to explore this some more. | |
And when I started this, I wasn't at all convinced that it was a subject that was worth putting on here because I kind of thought, well, this must be a fake or, you know, there need to have been more sightings for it to be in any way credible. | |
But now I want to do some more research. | |
Yeah, it's a very interesting topic. | |
And you can read about it in my book, The Great Bigfoot Film Mystery. | |
It's available at Pattersonfilm.com. | |
That's the only place you can get it. | |
It's an underground book, but it's very well written. | |
It's professionally printed. | |
It's not like Roger Patterson's original book, which he wrote on manuscript paper. | |
And it's not what they call here a vanity project. | |
No, no, this is a very, very well-professionally produced book. | |
I'm very proud of it. | |
I put my name on it. | |
I don't use a fake name. | |
Some people use, you know, they use author names. | |
What do they call them? | |
Pseudonyms. | |
Pseudonyms, yes. | |
No, this is all my work. | |
This is done, researched. | |
I thought there could be a movie in this. | |
I think there could be a movie in this, and you could be the consultant. | |
How about that? | |
I would love to be. | |
Yeah, if any film people interested in this, hey, give me a call. | |
Now, I want you to do something. | |
Next time you go out in the snows, it's beginning of December now of Wisconsin, and it's deeply sub-zero, and it's getting on for nighttime. | |
Do you have wolves out there? | |
Yes. | |
Wolves. | |
Wolves are starting to howl, and I don't know what other wild creatures you have out there, but if they're starting to make those eerie noises. | |
And if you see something tall in the shadows and you think it might be Bigfoot, call me. | |
I will. | |
In fact, one time I was doing an interview and I was on the phone doing the interview at the time. | |
I was looking out my back deck and all of a sudden I see something moving in the trees and the woods and it starts growling. | |
I thought it was a person, maybe with a chainsaw, and I couldn't figure it out. | |
I almost started. | |
You had to worry. | |
Yeah, what it was was two bear started walking through my property. | |
And I was, for a minute there, I thought it was Bigfoot. | |
Of course, I'd forgotten about the bears. | |
You probably got bears there. | |
Black bears, yes. | |
And just very quickly, this has nothing to do with Bigfoot, but I've often wondered about it because England is not like where you are. | |
If you find yourself out, if you're innocent British tourist and you're out in the wilds and you find yourself confronted with a bear and the bear looks hungry, what do you do apart from panic? | |
It depends what kind of bear you're encountering. | |
Well, a big one. | |
If it's a black bear, they tell you to try to scare it away a little bit. | |
That's one theory. | |
Now, if it's a grizzly bear, I don't know. | |
They might not go for the scare tactic. | |
Grizzly bears are a different animal altogether than black bears. | |
And is it true that you don't run, whatever you do? | |
I don't know. | |
I've heard a couple different theories on this. | |
And, you know, when you're in the wild, who knows? | |
I don't want to give anybody bad advice. | |
Because it's America. | |
They might come and sue you. | |
And the other, I don't know whether this is an urban myth as well or a wild myth, that you don't try and climb up a tree because that's what they do too. | |
Yeah. | |
In fact, I looked out my door one day and I did see a black bear up the tree. | |
It was halfway up the tree. | |
And they do climb trees. | |
God, it makes London feel so tame. | |
Hey, listen, just plug your website again so that if anybody wants to get the book, they can go there. | |
Sure. | |
Go to pattersonfilm.com and you can buy my book. | |
It's the Great Bigfoot Film Mystery. | |
It's available in several formats. | |
And I just had somebody buy one over in the UK. | |
And I hope I get many more people exploring this mystery. | |
It's an amazing subject. | |
I think you'll get some more. | |
Okay. | |
Thank you very much for that. | |
Jeff Hilling in Wisconsin. | |
I hope that someday I get to see Wisconsin. | |
Thank you very much for being on The Unexplained. | |
Thank you for having me on your program, Howard. | |
Well, as they say, food for thought. | |
A subject you asked me to get into on the show, and now we've done it. | |
Jeff Hilling in Wisconsin, USA, talking about Bigfoot. | |
And maybe we've only just started the debate on this. | |
What do you think of all of that? | |
Drop me an email. | |
Go to the website wwwtheunexplained.tv. | |
You can email me from there. | |
There's a link. | |
You can also make me a donation to keep this work going. | |
That is vital because you know we want to develop it across 2012. | |
So go to www.theunexplained.tv, our fabulous website designed by Adam Cornwell at Creative Hotspot in Liverpool. | |
Thank you again to Martin as we come to the end of this year. | |
Martin, I hope you're doing well for the theme tune that you designed for us. | |
Hope all's good with you. | |
And above all else, thank you to you for keeping the faith, for sending me some lovely emails and for listening to The Unexplained. | |
Tell your friends about this show. | |
Spread the word in any way you can on Facebook, by email, word of mouth, phone calls. | |
I don't mind. | |
Tell the world about the unexplained because I think we're getting somewhere right around the world and it's marvelous to hear from people right across the United States and Canada, as well as Europe and the UK and the other countries who listen To this show. | |
Thank you very much. | |
Well, my voice just about held up through the show. | |
Hopefully, I'm going to sound a little better the next time round, but that'll be edition 74, won't it? | |
My name is Howard Hughes. | |
Please take care. |