- BOTHELL, Wash. (AP) - In the hearts and minds of true believers, Bigfoot's
existence has long been enshrined in a single minute of jerky, grainy
footage of a startled sasquatch retreating into the upper California woods.
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- But two enthusiasts of the legendary
being are alleging four magnified frames of the 16 mm footage show tracings
of a bell-shaped fastener at Bigfoot's waist. They say the creature in
the so-called Patterson-Gimlin Film can finally be dismissed as a man
in a monkey suit.
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- ''It was a hoax,'' said Cliff Crook,
a longtime Bigfoot tracker who devotes rooms to sasquatch memorabilia in
this suburb north of Seattle. ''How can an artificial, manmade object
end up on a Bigfoot?''
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- The film, purportedly showing a female
Bigfoot fleeing a streambed, was taken by Roger Patterson and Bob Gimlin
on Oct. 20, 1967. It has largely withstood independent scrutiny and, for
many steeped in the lore of the man-beast, has become bedrock evidence
of its very existence.
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- ''There's no way of really detracting
from it,'' said Ray Crowe, president of the Western Bigfoot Society in
Portland, Ore. The image captured in the footage ''has a fluid motion.
It's a wild creature of nature.''
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- The film is important because many Bigfoot
believers compare all plaster casts of telltale footprints against those
made by Patterson the day he purportedly filmed the creature slinking
across a sandbar in the Six Rivers National Forest.
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- Discredit the footage, experts agree,
and the gold standard for Bigfoot tracks will be washed away.
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- Crook bases his assertion on computer
enhancements performed by Chris Murphy, a Bigfoot buff from Vancouver,
British Columbia, who maintains he discovered an aberration in the footage
in 1995 while helping his son Daniel prepare a class project.
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- Murphy declined to be interviewed, instead
supplying a written narrative detailing his discovery.
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- According to that account, the Murphys
used a color photocopier to duplicate a frame of the Patterson film. Zooming
in again and again, Chris Murphy became suspicious.
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- To him, something geometric - vaguely
the shape of a bottle opener - seemed to take shape at Bigfoot's waist.
Murphy maintains that four sequential computer-scanned frames of the film
show the object in different positions, as if it were swinging. He theorizes
something is cinching the sasquatch costume in place.
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- Murphy made a clay model of the object
and in October gave that and the enlargements to Crook, a charter-bus driver
transfixed by sasquatch stories since 1957. That's the year he made a
camping trip with teen-age friends on Washington's Olympic Peninsula that
ended with telltale signs of a sasquatch encounter: a rustling of brush,
a throaty growl and an ever-worsening hallmark musk.
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- Decades later, at 58, spare rooms in
his home are dubbed ''Bigfoot Central,'' stuffed with photos, plaster casts
and maps dotted with push-pins that chart sasquatch sightings.
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- Now his hoax assertion is giving rise
to a howl that would make a Bigfoot proud. Longtime enthusiasts smell a
deserter.
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- One recent e-mail was typical of the
incredulity Crook's allegation of a costume fastener is up against.
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- ''Cliff, Cliff, Cliff,'' it scolded.
''That's matted feces.''
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- ''There are two witnesses (and) there
are footprints,'' said Rene Dahinden, a Richmond, British Columbia, researcher
who shares the film's copyright. ''We've never had anything like it previously,
and anything like it since.''
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- Dahinden, 68, discounts Murphy as an
amateur. ''He wasn't involved in this until 1993,'' Dahinden said. ''He
couldn't spell the name 'sasquatch' before that.''
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- Grover Krantz, a Western Washington University
anthropology professor and Bigfoot expert, also believes firmly in the
old footage.
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- ''I fully accept the Patterson film,''
Krantz said. ''If there was a fastener, it could not be seen in an enlargement.
The film grain is such that it cannot hold an image of something that
small.''
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- The truth of the Patterson-Gimlin film
remains as elusive as Bigfoot itself. Enthusiasts such as Krantz and Crowe
see the film as a building block for their faith. And the faiths of Crook
and Murphy endure in spite of it.
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- Crook knows that, in dissent, he and
Murphy are ''far outnumbered.''
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- ''There's a few broken friendships because
of this,'' Crook said. ''I just figured, 'This is a search for the truth.
When it becomes something different, that's when it should stop.'''
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- Maybe a Bigfoot will one day view the
film, Crook figures, and offer its own disapproving grunt.
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- ''There's just too much evidence that
these creatures do inhabit certain areas out there,'' Crook said, ever
sanguine. ''Even though the Patterson film is a hoax, it doesn't mean
Bigfoot doesn't exist.''
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