When was the first footage of Bigfoot ever shot?
As much as this fact might make you lose faith in humanity, if enough people believe in something, it’s worth looking into.
To be 100% clear, that’s absolutely not to say that if enough people believe, there’s even the slightest grain of truth to it. We can take the most cursory of glances at the modern world and see a truly distressing amount of blatant misinformation being taken as fact by a depressing number of people. Some of them are even people who seem right-thinking and sensible on the surface. No, just because people believe something doesn’t make it true; it makes it worth investigating.
In fact, in a perverse way, people believing something probably untrue makes it even more worthy of investigating. You can learn a lot about people by looking into why they believe in something with such little basis in fact, and honestly, there’s no better proof in this than the big daddy of all cryptids, Bigfoot. Like… Bigfoot isn’t real. He’s just not. There’s absolutely no proof of his existence that hasn’t been conclusively proven to be a hoax. And yet.
The community surrounding Bigfoot just won’t go away. This is far more than a mere fandom; it’s people who genuinely believe that Sasquatch is a real creature that the government is covering up for reasons unknown. These people feel as if they’re being told by shadowy figures to disregard what their eyes, ears and wits are telling them and accept their dogma or else.
In a way, this dedication can be traced back to one of the most famous pieces of footage in the entire conspiracy community.
When was the first footage of Bigfoot ever shot?
In 1967, Roger Patterson and Robert Gimlin rode out of Bluff Creek, California. The two of them had been involved in Bigfoot communities for the past few years and had reason to believe that there were a few of the cryptids living in the area, a tributary of the Klamath River. On October 20th, the duo filmed an outing they went on to the Creek, and if you asked them, they swore for the rest of their days that they filmed a female sasquatch.
Credit to them, the footage is pretty incredible, with the iconic turn and look coming as the creature stalked back into the undergrowth with Patterson and Gimlin in hot pursuit. In the days before Photoshop and AI, one can imagine people being convinced by this footage. If this were someone in a suit, it would have to be a professional-grade suit. The kind of professional-grade suit that you’d need if you were making a film about Bigfoot sightings. Y’know, the thing that Patterson and Gimlin were in Bluff Creek making that very year.
It’s true. Patterson and Gimlin had initially scouted out Bluff Creek as a filming location for an independent film they were making about Bigfoot sightings throughout history. One can easily imagine them striking gold with an incredible Bigfoot costume, scrapping the rest of the film and just making the footage that has made them immortal in the world of conspiracy theories. Several of the people who worked on the film have claimed that they assisted with creating this footage, but if they want to convince people that Bigfoot is a hoax, they’re barking up the wrong tree.
Which is the real reason that all these hoaxes and conspiracy theories are worth examining? Outside of all the people in it as a grift, we do have to wonder what gives people the hope and drive to continue believing in their cause when the entire world tells them otherwise. If conspiracy theories didn’t pretty much always fall into bigotry, it would almost be admirable.