"Capturing Bigfoot" — Great Documentary, Likely Will Not Settle Any Arguments
I watched the new Capturing Bigfoot documentary recently — it just came out today, October 20, timed to the 59th anniversary of the Patterson-Gimlin film — and I want to say this first, and regardless of any of the arguments about the footage itself, it's a really well-done documentary.
Well filmed, well researched, and genuinely entertaining. If you just like documentaries, you'll like this movie. If you like documentaries and mysteries of the unknown, you'll like it even more. And if you're like me — interested in the underlying truth behind this stuff, then this is the movie for you.
Because this film isn't really about the footage. It's about the people around the footage.
The story behind the 59 seconds
Almost everyone knows the famous clip: 59 seconds of shaky 16mm film from Bluff Creek, California in 1967, a large hairy figure walking away across a creek bed, glancing back over its shoulder at the camera. What most people don't know — even people who are interested in this stuff and have gone a little way down the rabbit hole — is the full background story of what happened around it.
Roger Patterson took that film on the road. There was real money in it — by some estimates, in today's dollars, something like five or six million dollars made showing that film around the country. That means there were a lot of people with a vested interest in you believing it was real. Some of those people are still around, and in some cases, analyzing that footage and defending it is essentially how they make their living now.
The documentary is built around interviews with the people who were actually there, or right next to it — family, film handlers, the people tangled up in the money and the aftermath. That's what makes it a good story. Not the creature. The humans.
If there's one frustration I had, it's that the newly discovered footage isn't really presented in a way that lets you sit and analyze it frame by frame. The film isn't trying to be a forensic breakdown. It's telling the story of the people, and it trusts that story to make its case. You can feel where the filmmakers land — they clearly lean toward it being a hoax — but they never really come right out and hit you over the head with a verdict. It's implied, heavily, through the interviews themselves.
Bigfoot vs Patterson-Gimlin film
I want to be clear about something I've always believed: the validity of the Patterson-Gimlin film has no bearing on whether or not a Bigfoot-type creature exists.
If that film is fake, it doesn't prove Bigfoot isn't real. It would just prove that that film isn't real. And if it were real, it wouldn't by itself prove everything else people claim, either. For decades that footage has been pointed to as the strongest, most compelling piece of evidence for the existence of this kind of creature, and I think that's exactly why it's worth examining honestly.
So what is the new footage?
The centerpiece of the documentary is a short clip, allegedly shot in 1966, that was locked in a safe for decades by the man who developed film for Patterson. His wife, by the accounts in the film, told him never to talk about it.
Why would a piece of film sit in a safe for 50-plus years if it was nothing?
That's the question that hangs over the whole documentary, and there are basically two competing explanations for what that clip shows:
1. It was a test run. A rehearsal. They tried it once, it didn't look convincing, and they did it again — and the famous footage we all know is the second attempt. Bob Heironimus, the man who has long claimed he wore the suit in the famous film, looks at this new footage and says that's not him — he was only involved once. That has led some people to argue the person in the new clip is Patterson's brother-in-law, trying it first, before they brought Heironimus in. I'd actually heard a version of that argument before I ever knew this documentary existed.
2. It was a recreation for a documentary Patterson was already trying to make. This isn't a stretch on its own — nobody disputes that Patterson was filming documentary material. Under this theory, they had captured something real in 1967, and later tried to recreate it for the documentary he wanted to make about it. Of course you'd want to echo the famous moment. Of course you'd copy the walk, the look back over the shoulder. And if you're recreating it from memory and description, the costume wouldn't be a perfect match — it would be close, which, frankly, is what the new footage looks like. Similar in a lot of ways. Not exact.
The hazy area is timing: which footage was filmed first? And to be fair, the costume in the new footage looks decidedly different (and more like a costume) than the Patterson footage, although very similar. But that also points to a test run, where they realized it wasn't convincing and made changes.
Where the recreation argument gets hard
The problem is everything around the new footage.
If this was just an innocent recreation for a documentary, why did the film developer lock it in a safe and never talk about it? Why would his wife forbid him from discussing it? A recreation wouldn't be controversial. It wouldn't need to be hidden.
Then there's Patterson's own family. His wife, on film, essentially says she knows it wasn't true. His son says much the same, though he can't know it with the same certainty she probably did. The brother-in-law's wife flatly says "it was a hoax" on-camera. And Bob Gimlin — who has maintained the story for nearly 60 years — sure seemed, in the footage of him at a Bigfoot conference in this documentary, like an old man who was basically going along with an admission. I can make allowances for age. But it didn't look like a man defending the film, either.
And maybe most telling to me: in all these years, with all these interviews, nobody involved ever mentioned making a recreation. Not once. If they'd filmed one, that would have been the simplest explanation in the world to offer up at any point.
Add in the circumstantial side — the brother-in-law whose construction business was on the ropes, who then rather suddenly came into serious money right around all of this — and while none of it is proof on its own, put together as one whole picture, it's really hard not to conclude something fishy was going on. Either this was a test run for a hoax, or someone was trying to capitalize on it after the fact. To me, it points more toward the test run.
It still leaves a genuine question, though: if the same people filmed both clips, which one came first?
Blink and you'll miss me — literally
One neat personal note: Monsterologist is actually in this movie. For a fraction of a second.
It happens at 2 minutes and 15 seconds in, in a fast montage of Bigfoot signs and artwork. The filmmakers pulled one of my old Bigfoot sketches, and flashed it on screen. The sketch is called "The Bigfoot Lebowski." It's exactly what it sounds like: a play on The Big Lebowski, with Bigfoot standing there in the Dude's bathrobe and sunglasses, plaid shorts, giant sandals, holding a White Russian. The Squatch abides.
A photo of my screen, which feels like fittingly low-fi evidence for a Bigfoot sighting:
2:15 into Capturing Bigfoot — that's my "Bigfoot Lebowski" sketch in the middle of the montage. Bathrobe, sunglasses, White Russian and all.
So if you're watching and you see a bathrobe-wearing Bigfoot in sunglasses flash by at 2:15, that's mine.
Why it matters either way
Here's the thing the documentary gets right: that 1967 film is an iconic piece of American culture now, whether you believe it or not. It's in the same mental drawer as the Zapruder film and the moon landing footage — images from that era that just lodged themselves in our collective memory and never left.
I'm actually headed out to Bluff Creek and Willow Creek myself next month, which maybe makes me exactly the kind of person this film was made for. I don't need this documentary to tell me what to believe about Bigfoot. I don't think it can, and honestly, I don't think that's its job.
What it does do — really well — is show you the behind-the-scenes human story: the money, the friendships, the family legacy, and the controversy that has followed 59 seconds of film for almost six decades.
Whether you walk away convinced it was a hoax, convinced it was a recreation of something real, or somewhere in the messy middle where I landed — it's a fascinating, entertaining watch, and it's worth your time.
If Bigfoot is your thing too, take a look at my Bigfoot patches and Bigfoot stickers — original artwork, designed by a guy who has spent way too much time thinking about 59 seconds of film from 1967.