The Making of Bigfoot: The Inside Story: Long, Greg, Korff, Kal K.: 9781591021391: Amazon.com: Books (original) (raw)

I was nine years old and living near the Pine Creek Gorge (Pennsylvania's "Grand Canyon") on the edge of a town named Wellsboro, population 4,000, when the Patterson hoax was perpetrated. I spent my childhood building tree-forts in the woods and dreaming of a remote life, which eventually brought me to interior Alaska, living in a cabin in the woods the last 26 years.

With nearly a half-century's cumulative years of woodland hiking, backpacking, hunting, trapping, fishing, boating, snowmachining, four-wheeling, and piloting modified supercubs all over the wilderness - shooting bears in self defense, feeding moose by hand, raising orphaned ravens, wolves eating one of my dogs, etc. - I never saw myself nor even met anyone with the slightest bit of bona-fide wilderness experience who had seen a bigfoot, or even a track, including a parter who climed Mt. McKinley with me that grew up in the county next to the hoax site.

So my approach to the book was on of genuine skeptic by experience. The famous film looked like a man in a gorilla suit to me, and the cameraman acting to obscure his hoax by shaking the camera around and choosing the optimal distance to evade close scrutiny. Obviously, this predisposition influenced my opinion of the book. I was looking for an explanation of the hoax details, as there is zero doubt in my mind no bigfoot exists.

Greg Long was the first to bother looking into the background of the principals in the Bluff Creek Bigfoot film hoax, which is the reason the hoax was so successful. It is the first genuine critical public inquiry, despite all the critical analysis of the film itself. Had any investigator checked into the impossible film development timeline from the alleged encounter on Friday afternoon Oct. 20th to the first showing of the film on Sunday the 22nd, the hoax would have immediatly been exposed.

Roger Patterson's background explains perfectly the entire affair. On the one hand you have to respect his impressive athletic and artistic abilities, but on the other hand he was dishonest and left an amazing trail of debts, fraud, and broken agreements. One can understand why people fell under his spell, and how he was uniquely qualified to pull off the bigfoot hoax of the century.

The story, should it be told linearly, is almost like a Greek Tragedy with an anti-hero who has brilliantly exploded at his zenith, to be struck down by cancer at a young age. But this too enabled the myth to survive because Roger's relentless scamming would certainly have brought far more scrutiny to the film early enough to remove any doubt about the hoax.

There was a lot I did not expect here, such as the dishonesty and greed of Rene Dahinden, a bigfoot sleuth of repute (rather like an expert goblin or elf hunter) overtaking his initial certainty of a hoax once he obtained proprietary interest in the film rights. But this material explains how even an enemy of Roger Patterson becomes a bigfoot film promoter once there's money to be made - literally garbage cans full of cash gleefully dumped on one another at some of the early road shows with DeAtley.

Millionaire road-builder DeAtley, himself utterly contemptuous of the existence of bigfoot, was the one person with the business acumen to strike while the iron was hot, grab the fists full of cash from those duped, and git out whilst the gittin' was good. Long did enough questioning and De Atley did enough talking (thankfully) without directly confessing to his role in financing the development and editing of the film. To do so directly would be the confession of fraud for an enormous sum of money.

So many others left holding the bag... investors stiffed, friends gypped, lawsuits, reputations compromised - it is a spider-web of tragedies with Roger Patterson at the epicenter.

There are only two people now capable of coming forward to pound the last nails in this coffin for the true believers: Patty Patterson and Bob Gimlin. Patty has too much to lose unless somehow the risk of fraud were removed and the right amount of cash were placed on the barrel-head. Greg Long did not expect money to explain so much of everything, but in retrospect - Duh!

Gimlin too, since he did make money from the fraud has something to lose by coming forward, and this goes a long way towards explaining why Bob Heironimus did: in his own words he was one of the many "suckers" Patterson screwed to pull this off. Heironimus was merely convenient for his size and stature (perfect for the bigfoot suit) along with his trustworthiness in maintaining the secret. He was never paid the thousand dollars promised for his participation, he never profited from subsequent marketing frauds, so he had nothing to lose by confessing. He did have very limited gain confessing, achieving a clearer conscience than Gimlin, some minor notoriety, but no sizeable money.

Gimlin is a bit of a sad character, wearing the indian wig to amp-up the ridiculous "indian tracker sidekick" image when Roger was putting together his hoax. "Lone Ranger" Roger Patterson's "Tonto" as it were, also screwed out of the big money, and limping off to the sidelines initially. More recently he's been basking in the attention he's receiving with the bigfooters. A consolation prize of sorts.

Bigfoot enthusiasts will of course seize upon the slightest discrepancies four decades of memory have blurred, and the fact Roger is not here to explain exactly how he modified the suit obtained from Phillip Morris. There is a great deal at stake for them. It is a cherished belief for which egos, reputation, and money are on the line.

Greg Long deserves a lot of credit for the work he did here, and at the same time he probably understands better than anyone else why he takes such scorn from the true believers/true fraudsters in the bigfoot community. I read the petty, vicious reviews they wrote here before purchasing the book, expecting a very poorly written piece mostly talking about drinking colas and gobbling munchies. What those reviews show instead is how the veins on their necks must be bursting with rage at Long for deigning to expose this.

I found the piece very well written and fascinating enough to finish in three evenings. Thank you Greg, a job well done.