BLUFF CREEK BIGFOOT A HOAX? WITNESS SAYS YES!

"Thirty-six years after the fact, Bob Hieronimus' conscience finally caught up with him; he confessed to having donned a gorilla costume and appearing in the famous 1967 film footage of Bigfoot."

"'It's time people knew it was a hoax,' Hieronimus told the Washington Post. For decades, the grainy film clip has fueled study and speculation about the existence of a large mysterious creature in the (USA's) Pacific Northwest."

"'It's time to let this thing go,' he told the paper, 'I've been burdened with this for 36 years, seeing the film clip on TV numerous times. Somebody's making lots of money off this, except for me. But that's not the issue. The issue is that it's time to finally let people know the truth.'"

"The Post reported Hieronimus made his official confession in the book The Making of Bigfoot by paranormal investigator Greg Long. The author says he spent four years investigating the 60-second film and the people behind it. Long traced the Bigfoot costume to Philip Morris, a North Carolina gorilla suit specialist, who says he sold it for $435 to an amateur documentary maker named Roger Patterson (who died in 1972--J.T.)."

"The hoax was staged near Bluff Creek in northern California, according to Hieronimus."

"'Patterson was the cameraman,' Long told the Post, 'They made a gentleman's agreement that Bob (Hieronimus) would get in the suit and walk in front of the camera for $1,000.'"

"Hieronimus' story is a bit different. 'I was never paid a dime for that, no sir,' he said, adding, 'Sure, I want to make some money. I feel that after 36 years I should get some of it.'"

However, "the news doesn't change the views of an open-minded Jane Goodall, a well-known primatologist. 'She's spoken to people whom she respects who say they have seen one of these hominids,' said Nora Gandelman, an aide to Goodall. 'And to many other people she respects who have heard strange calls they thought were made by Bigfoot. As a scientist, she has a very open mind about this and has yet to close the door on this possibility.'"

"An associate of the deceased filmmaker (Patterson) is challenging the veracity of Hieronimus' story. The Post says it was contacted by Tom Malone, a Minneapolis (Minnesota) lawyer, working on behalf of Bob Gimlin, an associate of Patterson's."

"'I'm authorized to tell you that nobody wore a gorilla suit or monkey suit, and that Mr. Gimlin's position is that it's absolutely false and untrue,' Malone told the paper." (See WorldNet Daily for March 10, 2004, "Man admits: 'I was Bigfoot.' Many thanks to Steve Wilson Sr. for this news story.)

Patterson film
By John Green

Almost thirty-seven years ago two young men from Yakima, Washington, Roger Patterson and Bob Gimlin, emerged from a remote forest in the northwest corner of California with a brief 16-millimeter film showing a hairy creature walking along a sand bar on its hind legs, and the debate on whether their film shows an unknown animal or a man wearing a fur suit has gone on ever since.

Now, thanks to a new book on the subject, that debate should be at an end. The answer has been in plain view all along, the creature on the film holding it, quite literally, in its arms. And that answer, ironically, is the opposite of the one in the book.

The creature can not be a man in a suit.

The writer of the book, of which only review copies are so far available, claims to have cracked the case by finding two key witnesses, the man who wore the suit, a Yakima acquaintance of Patterson and Gimlin named Bob Heironimus, and the man who sold a gorilla suit to Patterson and told him how to modify it, Philip Morris, a costume maker from Charlotte, North Carolina.

The Heironimus story is not new. It surfaced several years ago one of the many unsubstantiated claims to have been “the man in the suit” that crop up from time to time. Phillip Morris appears to be a real find, a man who actually was making gorilla costumes in 1967 and who says he remembers selling one to Roger Patterson.

One of the things that Morris is quoted as saying is that the way to make the arms in the suit look longer than human arms is to extend the gloves of the suit on sticks. Many people have noted that the arms of the creature in the film look unusually long, almost as long as its legs. Some, including myself in 1968, have published estimates of their length. No one went on to deal with the question of how human arms could be extended to match the extra length and what such an extension would look like.

There is no way to establish for certain if any of the dimensions estimated for the creature in the film are accurate, but what can be established with reasonably accuracy is the length of the creature’s legs and arms in relation to one another. From that ratio, which anatomists call the “intermembral index”, it is simple to calculate how many inches must be added to the arms of a man of known size in order to make his arms long enough to fit the supposed suit. In my own case the answer turns out to be about 10 inches.

But in order for the arms to bend at the elbow, which they plainly do in the movie, all of that extra length has to be added to the lower arm. The result, in my case, is about 12 inches of arm above the elbow and 29 inches below it—almost as much of a monstrosity as Edward Scissorhands. The creature in the movie has normal-looking arms. It cannot be a man in a suit.

Many issues in the long debate about the movie remain unresolved— what the film speed was, whether a man could duplicate the creature’s unusual bent-kneed walk, whether its behavior was normal for an animal, whether the tracks left on the sandbar could have been faked, and so on—but all of them turn out to have been irrelevant to the main issue.

My measurements of the film, made 36 years ago, gave the creature arms that were 30 inches from the shoulder to the wrist and legs that were 35 inches from the hip to the ground. My own measurements are about 24 inches from shoulder to wrist and 40 inches from hip to ground. Only the ratios of the measurements matter, the actual size of either the human or the creature makes no difference, and the ratios for creature and human are so much different that precise accuracy of the measurements is not significant either. The much ridiculed Patterson-Gimlin film does not show a man in a suit.

What about Roger Patterson buying a gorilla suit? Philip Morris does not claim to have records, only a memory, and neither Mrs. Patterson nor Bob Gimlin remember Roger having any such suit. But Roger was trying to make a Bigfoot documentary at that time and most such documentaries contain re-enactments by someone wearing a fur suit. If he did buy one it has little more significance than an apprentice carpenter buying a hammer.

And the descriptions of the suit by the two key witnesses are totally contradictory. Morris is quoted as having described his suit in precise detail, and how he made it. The suit had six separate pieces: a head a body (arms, torso and legs), two hands and two feet. A knitted cloth material served as a backing to thousands of synthetic nylon strands called dynel, which were driven by a powerful knitting machine with needles through the knitted cloth material and then pulled back through to the other side. It had a 36-inch zipper up the back.

Bob Heironimus is also quoted, saying that Patterson made the suit himself by skinning a dead horse and gluing fur from an old fur coat on the horsehide. It was in three parts, head, torso and legs that felt like bigger rubber boots and that went to his waist. He thought the feet were made of old house slippers. The suit weighted 20 or 25 pounds and he needed help to get in and out of it. It also smelled bad. “It stunk. Roger skinned out a dead, red horse.”

by Jeff Meldrum...

“It has been obvious to even the casual viewer that the film subject possesses arms that are disproportionately long for its stature. John Green is a veteran researcher into the question of Sasquatch or Bigfoot. He was among the first to view the film captured by Patterson and Gimlin and has studied it intensely in the intervening years. His recognition of the significance of the unhumanly long arms of the film subject is point that has not previously been articulated in such a straightforward manner. It is such a fundamental observation that it is considered a breakthrough in assessing the validity of this extraordinary film. Anthropologists typically express limb proportions as an intermembral index (IM), which is the ratio of combined arm and forearm skeletal length (humerus + radius) to combined thigh and leg skeletal length (femur + tibia) x 100. The human IM averages 72. The intermembral index is a significant measure of a primate's locomotor adapatation. The forelimb-dominated movements of the chimp and gorilla are reflected in their high IM indices of 106 and 117 respectively. Identifying the positions of the joints on the film subject can only be approximate and the limbs are frequently oriented obliquely to the plane of the film, rendering them foreshortened to varying degrees. However, in some frames the limbs are nearly vertical, hence parallel to the filmplane, and indicate an IM index somewhere between 80 and 90, intermediate between humans and African apes. In spite of the imprecision of this preliminary estimate, it is well beyond the mean for humans and effectively rules out a man-in-a-suit explanation for the Patterson-Gimlin film without invoking an elaborate, if not inconceivable, prosthetic contrivance to account for the appropriate positions and actions of wrist and elbow and finger flexion visible on the film. This point deserves further examination and may well rule out the probability of hoaxing.”

Jeff Meldrum Ph.D. Associate professor of Anatomy & Anthropology Idaho State University Pocatello, Idaho, 83209-8007. Dr. Meldrum is an expert in primate anatomy and locomotion. He recently coedited, From Biped to Strider: The Emergence of Modern Human Walking, Running, and Resource Transport. He became interested in the sasquatch question eight years ago after witnessing 15-inch tracks in southeastern Washington state. He has examined numerous footprints, including those associated with the Patterson Gimlin film.

Bigfoot as Big Lie -- Is Someone Monkeying Around?

By JANE GARGAS YAKIMA HERALD-REPUBLIC

Truth be told, those have been mighty large feet he's had to fill all these years. Or are they? For nearly 40 years, Bob Heironimus of Yakima has figured prominently in speculation over whether a legendary creature called Bigfoot exists. But always before Heironimus has never been named publicly. Bigfoot, or Sasquatch, is one of the most famous legends of the Northwest — and beyond. Similarly to Scotland's Loch Ness Monster, there have been numerous "sightings" of the ape-human creature for decades. Heironimus, 63, leapt into the limelight this week because of a newly published book called "The Making of Bigfoot," written by paranormal investigator Greg Long, who lives north of Seattle. In it, Heironimus bares all — including, he says, one large, hairy suit — telling the author that he donned a gorilla costume in 1967 to pose as Bigfoot in a film clip. The 60-second, blurry clip has been copiously studied by Bigfoot investigators. The film was shot in Bluff Creek, Northern California, by two other Yakima residents, the now deceased Roger Patterson and Bob Gimlin. When it first became public, the film put Yakima at the center of on the Bigfoot controversy (does it or doesn't it exist?); details emerging this week about Heironimus' story will no doubt keep it there. Heironimus, who is retired from Pepsi, is currently staying mum (he didn't return phone calls from the Yakima Herald-Republic), but Long's agent, Kal Korff, said Heironimus will provide details later, possibly at a news conference. But the controversy by no means stops there. And everyone is sticking to their own version. First, there is Long's. Korff, a journalist and investigator for Fox-TV's "World's Greatest Hoaxes" noted that there is more to the story than just a man who says he wore a gorilla suit coming forward. Rather, for the last 37 years, the filmmakers have foisted an untruth on the American public, according to Korff. "I want Bob Gimlin brought to justice. It's called consumer fraud," said Korff. "If he's smart, he'll come forward and confess." Yet, a lawyer for Gimlin insists that the film is authentic. Tom Malone (who also didn't return a phone call) from Minneapolis, told the Washington Post that Gimlin (who also didn't return a phone call), maintains that no one ever donned a costume to appear in his and Patterson's film. But Heironimus' mother, Opal Heironimus, who lives in Union Gap, stands by her son. "He was the real Bigfoot and that's the God's own truth," she said Monday. Not so fast, contends Berkeley-trained researcher Erik Beckjord of the San Francisco-based Sasquatch Research Project. Beckjord, who runs a Website called www.beckjord.com/bigfoot, is convinced the footage is the real thing. He said he's bothered by the fact that Heironimus has not publicly told his story. "If he has nothing to hide, he should come forward and hold a press conference," said Beckjord. Heironimus took and passed a polygraph test about wearing the Bigfoot suit several years ago, said his lawyer, Bruce Woodard of Yakima. "I have zero doubt in Bob's version," Woodard said. "I've met family and friends of Bob's, and they've substantiated everything he's said," Woodard added. But Beckjord is not convinced. For one thing, he scoffs at Long's mention in the book of tracing the gorilla suit to a man in North Carolina who said he sold it to Patterson. "They didn't even have gorilla suits, comparable to the one in the film, to buy or rent in 1967," Beckjord said. He also questions Heironimus' timeline. "Heironimus said he went to Bluff Creek (where the movie was filmed) two days after Gimlin and Patterson, but their wives both said it was three weeks later," said Beckjord. "I've been studying this for 25 years," said Beckjord, who has no doubts that Bigfoot exists. He said he has seen the creature four times, at least twice in Washington state. "This is an 'X File' kind of thing," said Beckjord, referring to the former television show about paranormal events. Bigfoot, he believes, can change form, partly to conform with what the viewer is thinking. Korff, for one, believes the controversy over the existence of Bigfoot will be put to rest soon. It will all come to light, he said, when author Long, Heironimus and several other people — including the man who claims he made the gorilla suit — tell their account on a national television special. "This is a huge story" Korff said. "And the Bigfoot market is now dead."

Sasquatch Speaks: The Truth Is Out There

Now it can be told: Bigfoot isn't real!

So says Bob Heironimus, a retired Pepsi bottler from Yakima, Wash., who reveals to the Reliable Source that he donned a gorilla costume and appeared in the famous grainy film clip that helped fuel the Bigfoot craze in 1967 and is studied by Bigfoot, Sasquatch and Yeti investigators to this day. "It's time people knew it was a hoax," Heironimus told us. "It's time to let this thing go. I've been burdened with this for 36 years, seeing the film clip on TV numerous times. Somebody's making lots of money off this, except for me. But that's not the issue -- the issue is that it's time to finally let people know the truth." Heironimus, 63, makes his full "confession," as he calls it, in a just-published book by paranormal investigator Greg Long, "The Making of Bigfoot." Long spent four years investigating the 60-second film clip and the people behind it. He traces the shaggy Bigfoot costume to a North Carolina gorilla suit specialist, Philip Morris, who says he sold it for $435 to an amateur documentary maker named Roger Patterson (who died in 1972). The hoax was staged near Bluff Creek in Northern California, according to Heironimus. "Patterson was the cameraman," Long tells us. "They made a gentleman's agreement that Bob would get in the suit and walk in front of the camera for $1,000." But, Heironimus says, "I was never paid a dime for that, no sir," and adds, "Sure I want to make some money. I feel that after 36 years I should get some of it." Backers of the Bigfoot legend include primatologist Jane Goodall, who was in Silver Spring last week to tout a new chimpanzee documentary that premieres tomorrow on Discovery Communications' Animal Planet network. Too busy to comment herself, Goodall authorized an aide, Nona Gandelman, to tell us she has read "countless books" about Bigfoot, Sasquatch, Yeti, Chinese wild men and other creatures. "She's spoken to people whom she respects who say they have seen one of these hominids," said Gandelman, "and to many other people she respects who have heard strange calls they thought were made by Bigfoot. As a scientist, she has a very open mind about this and has yet to close the door on the possibility." Bigfoot researcher John Green, a retired Canadian journalist, says the book doesn't disprove the existence of the mysterious beast. "It's all [expletive]," he told us. "There are going to be libel actions flying." Tom Malone, a lawyer in Minneapolis, called us Friday on behalf of Bob Gimlin, associate of the now-dead Bigfoot filmmaker. "I'm authorized to tell you that nobody wore a gorilla suit or monkey suit and that Mr. Gimlin's position is that it's absolutely false and untrue."

And the mystery lives on . . .