Bigfoot: The History and Legacy of North America’s Most Controversial Cryptid

by Charles River Editors

By coincidence, in 1968, the year after the film was taken, two Hollywood movies were released that featured actors wearing very convincing ape man costumes and makeup: Planet of the Apes and 2001: A Space Odyssey. Skeptics claimed that this proved that it was possible to make a wholly convincing Bigfoot suit (though none were able to explain how Roger Patterson or Bob Gimlin might have acquired one in 1967). But subsequent events have suggested that this isn’t entirely true. In the late 1990s, the BBC made a documentary about Bigfoot as part of a series called X Creatures. They commissioned special effects experts to produce a Bigfoot suit to show how easy it would be to fake the film, and they even filmed an actor wearing this suit in Bluff Creek. The resulting film clip was so laughably unlike the film that it was quietly edited out when this documentary was subsequently released on video, though it was still noted that it would have been easy to fake the Bigfoot seen in the 1967 footage.