- 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."
-
-
- Commentary
- By Jeff Meldrum, PhD
- 3-15-4
-
- 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 PhD Associate professor of Anatomy &
Anthropology Idaho State University Pocatello, Idaho, 83209-8007 208-282-4379
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.
|