Capturing Bigfoot is a documentary about the famous 1967 Patterson-Gimlin Footage that shows Bigfoot walking and turning around to look at the camera in passing. It includes interviews from many experts in the field as well as many individuals close to the footage, including Patterson’s son Clint and Gimlin himself.
I’m loving the discourse around it on /r/cryptozoology and /r/bigfoot.
Spoilers ahead
The gist behind the drama is that the makers of the documentary came into possession of footage purportedly from 1966 of a practice run of the 1967 PGF.
Personally, I find it incredibly convincing that it completely debunks the footage (though I was not a believer in the first place). Many individuals who were believers and experts in the field were shown the footage as part of the documentary and they do change theirs minds quite quickly.
The online community though has been extremely split. It seems like the consensus on /r/cryptozoology is that yes, the PGF is now debunked, but on /r/bigfoot they are adamant that this new footage is the fake and the PGF is real. It’s funny seeing in real time people trying to come to terms with new information that shakes their beliefs but also unsurprising at the depths of their denial.
I always want to believe this stuff, because it’s fun, but the people involved with paranormal/ufo/cryptid on a professional level are almost always running some type of scam. With this case specifically, the people saying “we didn’t have the costume technology to do that in the 60’s!” have always seemed kind of ridiculous.
If the PG film is fake, there is basically no evidence that Bigfoot exists AFAIK.
I’ve been a bigfoot head for a bit now and of all the footage I’ve seen the PGF is the only piece of clear evidence. So once that’s removed out of the equation all you have left is legends told by native american communities and hearsay throughout the years.
I used to love paranormal shit and I still have a little interest in it. I want to say that the idea that bigfoot is actually an interdimensional time traveler arose in the '90s in response to people being like: where is the evidence, aside from that movie that could be fake?
legends told by native american communities
That’s complete bullshit tbh. Most of these legends are retrofitted to have “bigfoot” attached to them when the original legend was just talking about a more wild group of people, or in many cases, bears, the bigfoot types will just lie about native American legends constantly, a lot of native groups are constantly telling them not to distort their culture and they don’t listen.
I have a casual fun interest in bigfoot/crptids, Because it’s apolitical and harmless, it’s like good 'ole folklore found throughout the world in rural areas. It even got a few legit scientists believing in bigfoot and the PG film, like Grover Furr and Jeff Muldoon. Never believed the PG film was legit, it’s so grainy that the talk about “anatomically accurate muscular movements” was due to how old and grainy the footage was. There were a lot of people who devoted their lives to bigfoot and the PG film being legit, that I have no doubt they are taking this new expose film very hard.
, Because it’s apolitical and harmless
Yeah, generally the only people who have time to walk around in the woods looking for bigfoot or whatever are the ones with big piles of cash lying around.
At my last job I once found myself working in the basement of a ghost hunter. I don’t remember much else about it. Also randomly, I found myself in a prepper’s basement. I remember exactly where that place is in case I need some food during the apocalypse. I also know where a lot of the guns are in my neighborhood.
Belief in Bigfoot is sublimated settler’s guilt
Are they trying to find it because it means there’s a part of the North American wilderness that hasn’t been fully-explored, meaning their conquest wasn’t complete, or because they missed out on killing one of the native species, and they’re out to finish the job?
No, I don’t think it’s about not doing the job thoroughly enough or having something to finish. It’s to prove to themselves that there’s still true wildness out there that remains untouched by settlers and that is a beautiful and mysterious thing. These days, it’s very common for rural settler-descendants (and their cultural imitators) to uphold vague Native American imagery immediately adjacent to Bigfoot imagery. Bigfoot is an amalgamation of both the wilderness and the indigenous people of the continent, and if he survives then there is hope for some sort of penance and recovery from the crime of settlement - and the way to prove that is to be a sleuthing conspiracy theorist instead of anti-colonial political action.
Most white Americans do understand to some extent the moral horror of how this country came to be and have to grapple with that deep-down guilt one way or another. Bigfoot is a great tool to externalize, individualize, depoliticize, and idealize that internal struggle. They’re ‘protecting’ Bigfoot, and therefore making up for the crimes of their ancestors to the extent they’re able.
That’s pretty much what I was going to try to get at with one of the directions, and then they both turned into bad-faith options because I hate this place, its history and the trajectory it has.
there are bigfoot myths in Native American beliefs, Even China has a Bigfoot called Yeren. And there are “hobbit myths” around the world, plenty in South East Asia. It’s just rural folklore.
Those aren’t “Bigfoot”, the very specific American folklore. I’m referring to that specific idea that has US cultural hegemony, not all variants of the hairy wild man across all folklore.
On the one hand it’s a fun pastime to be into the paranormal (so long as you don’t go off the deep end and start denying science to justify your beliefs). But on the other the fandom around such things attracts chud cranks out to inject fucking fascism into cryptozoology. So it’s very frustrating.
inject fucking fascism into cryptozoology.
the fascism was there the moment it went beyond a few people who saw some coyotes with mange
Are you thinking of Jeff Meldrum and not Muldoon? If so, he was also interviewed and featured prominently in this documentary.
The patterson gimlin film is their sacred idol, there’s nothing that could happen that would change their minds about it. You could have a direct recorded confession and they’d still just insist that everything but the film was faked.
I need to check this out. I had always found the footage compelling in that case, but if it’s debunked, it’s debunked.
