https://people.com/famous-1967-bigfoot-f...c-11926085
"Documentary filmmaker Marq Evans had a hunch that one day he might tackle the topic of Bigfoot — but he had no idea that he’d end up creating a film that could end up debunking the mystery linked to the creature that's lasted for 59 years.
His groundbreaking documentary, Capturing Bigfoot — which premieres this week at the 2026 SXSW Film & TV Festival — provides startling new evidence, he says, that finally proves that the most famous Bigfoot film of all time is nothing more than an “incredible hoax.”
Long held up as evidence that Bigfoot exists and responsible for launching the multi-million-dollar Bigfoot industry, the iconic, shaky 59-second silent clip that was shot in 1967 shows an enormous, hairy creature — later nicknamed Patty — walking slowly through a wooded area in a forest near Bluff Creek, Calif. “It really captured the imagination of billions of people over the past six decades,” says Evans.
Shot by a former rodeo star named Roger Patterson and his pal Robert Gimlin, the Patterson-Gimlin film had, for decades, been scrutinized by biologists, anthropologists and even Hollywood costume examiners looking to debunk its authenticity. Over the years, no one had been able to definitively prove that the 16mm movie was staged.
All that began to change in June 2024 when Evans, who has directed a handful of critically acclaimed documentaries, received an email from a part-time instructor named Teresa Brooks at Olympic College, where he teaches courses in documentary filmmaking.
"After her father’s death,” says Evans, 43, “she’d found a canister of 16mm film that had been sealed away for over half a century. She needed help getting it developed and wondered if I might be interested in doing something with it.”
Little did Evans know what had just been handed to him and its possible connection to the famed 1967 film. But he soon learned that Brooks’ father, a man named Norm Johnson — who spent years running the film department for Seattle’s Boeing Company — was connected to Patterson and Gimlin through his brother Dave. And it quickly became clear to Evans that Teresa’s father had developed the Patterson-Gimlin film, which immediately made headlines around the world after the footage was released in 1967.
“It caught fire right away,” says Evans. “As somebody said in our film, ‘It went viral before that word even existed.’ ”
Brooks told Evans that the reason the film had been locked away in a safe is because her mother had feared that her husband might have been involved with a short movie that she was convinced was probably a hoax. “She was concerned,” says Evans, “that Norm might get in trouble for being involved with it and told him to put away [any evidence of his involvement] and never speak about it again.”
Not long after receiving Brooks’ email, Evans had the 16mm film developed and days later found himself looking at a 40-second clip set in a location similar to the one in the 1967 movie, showing what appeared to be a slightly skinnier-looking Bigfoot walking into the woods.
“It took me maybe nine months to realize what we really had,” says Evans, who was able to determine, by markings on the film, that the footage had been shot in 1966, roughly a year before the now-famous clip in the 59-second Bigfoot movie was allegedly shot. “What we eventually found out is that [this new footage] represented a trial run, a rehearsal that was never discarded.”
Realizing he had physical evidence that finally put to rest the question of whether Patterson’s creation was a hoax, Evans knew he had the makings for an explosive documentary. He quickly went to work, he says, “connecting the dots” behind the making of the 1967 film and interviewing the cast of characters in Patterson’s hometown of Yakima, Wash., who were involved with its creation, including 80-something-year-old Bob Heironimus, who confessed to being the individual wearing the fake Bigfoot suit in the film.
Evans, whose father had grown up in Yakima and had heard plenty of gossip among locals about the film's authenticity, assumed that the family of Roger Patterson — who died of Hodgkin’s lymphoma in 1972 — would, as they always had, refuse to speak about the film, which had generated millions of dollars in licensing fees over the years. But once Evans showed the new footage to Patterson’s oldest son, Clint, a 66-year-old Montana rancher, he was eager to talk.
“He’d learned the film was a fake from his mother years earlier and had been wanting to come out and tell this story,” says Evans. “The lie had been really hard on him, and he was ready and wanting to get out from under it.”
What makes the story even more complicated and tragic, says Evans, is that Patterson, who by all accounts truly believed in Bigfoot’s existence, knew that he was dying in 1967 when he made and released his film.
“He knew he didn’t have long to live and that he was going to be leaving his wife with three young kids to take care of,” Evans says. “So he took a shot at leaving them some sort of legacy [that could possibly help pay the bills].”
The only piece of the mystery still unresolved is what happened to the Bigfoot suit that Patterson had painstakingly created. “Clint told me that he actually saw his dad burn the suit out behind the family house one night in a big barrel,” says Evans. “He basically spent about 30 minutes tossing it into the fire, piece by piece.”
Asked if he believes his documentary will finally force people to admit that Bigfoot is nothing more than a mixture of folklore, misidentified animal sightings and deliberate hoaxes, Evans isn’t optimistic.
“I certainly wasn’t some skeptic who set out to prove [Bigfoot] wasn’t real,” he says. “We were just focused on telling this story about the Patterson film. But I think for a lot of people who have so much history and belief tied up in this, it’s going to be really hard to accept.”
Capturing Bigfoot is screening at SXSW through March 16."
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