On Bigfoot's Trail

Deanna Pan: You've probably seen her before. Captured in grainy 16mm Kodachrome color film, she walks upstream along a sandbar on the opposite edge of a creek. It's an easy gait, brisk yet casual. Her knees are bent; her elongated arms swing freely at her sides. In a moment suspended in time, she glances back. Large eyes. Flat nose. Well-muscled back, buttocks and thighs. A large pair of conspicuous breasts dangle from her chest like sandbags.

She's big — 7 feet and 3 inches tall, some say, and 700 or more pounds. She's also almost entirely covered in dark brown hair.

To skeptics, she's just a hoax, an imposter in an ape suit. But to any Bigfoot investigator worth his salt, she's "Patty."

This iconic footage, known as the Patterson-Gimlin film, is widely considered the gold standard by which every other piece of Bigfoot evidence is weighed. Cryptozoologist Loren Coleman, who runs the International Cryptozoology Museum in Portland, Maine, likens the footage to the Zapruder film of John F. Kennedy's assassination. It's the best and and most controversial proof there is that large and elusive apelike hominoids roam the North American backwoods, and have been since antiquity. For Bigfoot believers, the comparison couldn't be more apt.

No one appreciates this more than Bob Gimlin, an 82-year-old horse handler from Yakima, Washington — the surviving half of the film's namesake. When we meet at a diner in Union Gap, he says he's got "a little gift" for me out in his truck. After rummaging through his black Escalade pickup, he hands me a batteries-not-included "Sasqwatch" that he personally autographed the night before.

"That's a signed Bob Gimlin case right there!" he says, smiling.