Today I Discovered An Enhanced Version Of The Patterson Bigfoot Footage


In 1967, filmmakers Roger Patterson and Bob Gimlin claimed to have run into a hairy, upright-walking creature while filming a documentary about horse riding in the Northern Californian wilderness. To back their claims, they presented an extremely shaky film shot on a Cine-Kodak K-100 camera that clearly depicts a large, bipedal humanoid rapidly walking away from the camera while glancing behind it. This became popularly known as the Patterson–Gimlin film and remains the most famous ‘Bigfoot footage’ ever captured.

The 59.5 seconds of film have sparked fierce debate among scientists and Bigfoot enthusiasts, with the unusual gait of the creature often posited as proof that the footage is genuine. Until recently, the shakiness of the footage made it difficult to tell one way or the other. Today I discovered a digitally remastered version on the internet that has been painstakingly stabilised to remove all camera movement. Watch it and judge for yourself.

The Patterson–Gimlin film remains the most compelling example of a ‘Bigfoot’ purportedly caught on camera. Patterson, who died of cancer in 1972, never wavered from his story. His co-filmmaker Robert Gimlin maintains that the event really happened to this day. If the footage was a hoax, both men seem committed to taking the secret to their graves.

The film is 23.85 feet long, contains 954 frames, and runs for 59.5 seconds at 16 frames per second (fps). Various anatomists and primate experts have weighed in on the possibility that the film subject is real based on the number of steps taken by the creature which does not seem to correlate with human walking. However, there remains some confusion over whether the footage was shot at 16fps or 18fps.

Advances in digital stabilisation techniques have allowed critics and believers alike to get a better look at the subject’s movements. The video below shows the original, unaltered footage followed by a zoomed and stabilised version to give a clearer vision of the creature’s movement. (The enhanced version kicks in at the one-minute mark.)

Looks like a bloke in a suit to us.


Today I Discovered is a daily dose of facts for Lifehacker readers – the weird, wonderful and sometimes worrying. Most of the time, it’s just mind-blowing. Let us know if you discovered anything that blew your mind in the comments!

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