- An extract from Bigfoot! The True Story of Apes in America,
copyright 2003, pages 106-107:
-
- ...During mid-January 1999, at Yakima, rumors began circulating
that the late Roger Patterson paid a Hollywood costume designer to make
the suit and paid a big "Yakima Indian" to wear it, and now the
owner of the suit had hired a local attorney to bring it out of the closet
for the world to see. Finally, late in January, mostly through reporter
David Wasson of the Yakima Herald-Republic, the story broke with the headline
"Bigfoot Unzipped - Man Claims It Was Him in a Suit".
-
- ...Zillah attorney Barry M. Woodard confirmed to Wasson
that he was representing a Yakima man who said he wore the elaborate ape
suit in the Patterson-Gimlin film, and that his client has passed a lie-detector
test to prove it.
-
- Wasson would write, "Woodard described the man only
as a fifty-eight-year-old lifelong resident of the Yakima Valley who approached
him a few months ago after a network news program called questioning authenticity
of the 1967 film. The man wanted help negotiating a deal for rights to
his story, ... as well as to explore any legal issues he might face as
a result of his involvement in the hoax."
-
- Attorney Woodard provided a statement from retired Yakima
police officer Jim McCormick, a certified polygraph examiner who administered
a lie-detector test on Woodard's client. Results of the seventy-five-minute
examination showed the man was telling the truth when asked about having
worn the Bigfoot suit in the 1967 film, McCormick wrote.
-
- Why weren't they coming quickly forward with a name and
details? Money-reasons. Woodard's client supposedly wanted to sign a contract
with the tabloid Sun before releasing any further information. But late
in February, 1999, a planned news conference never happened. Reports began
to circulate that the fifty-eight-year-old, six-foot-tall man who now weighed
two hundred pounds would be the laughingstock of a news conference when
asked to demonstrate how thirty years earlier he was able to portray the
special gait of a fifteen-hundred pound, six-foot-and-a-half-to-seven-foot-tall
Bigfoot. A year later, then two, now four, and no more news of this "exposé"
has surfaced.
- _____
-
- As you can see...some parts of this story are really
old news.
-
- Loren Coleman
- Portland, Maine
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