Bigfoot or big fake? To this day, nobody can prove either. It was today in 1967 that Bigfoot enthusiast Roger Patterson shot his famous movie of what he claimed was a genuine Bigfoot, aka Sasquatch, in a remote area of California’s Six Rivers National Forest. We took a look at the Wikipedia entry on this, and it goes into excruciating detail. In fact, we think the entry on regular apes is shorter. But these types of things do fan the flames of passion, if for no other reason than so many people seem to have a deep seated need to believe in the bizarre and/or supernatural. Roger Patterson's Bigfoot encounter certainly qualifies as the former. After reading everything we could find on the event, we draw no conclusions, except to say that if it was a hoax, it was one of the most perfectly planned hoaxes of all time.
It happened in the afternoon. Patterson and his companion that day, Robert Gimlin, were in a section of Six Rivers called Bluff Creek, and both were on horseback. The figure emerged from behind an overturned tree and was initially about twenty-five feet away. Patterson’s horse reared, and he lost valuable time as he struggled to dismount and retrieve his camera. Meanwhile the creature was moving away. When Patterson finally did begin filming, he was running to catch up, and the image he produced was shaky. Only in the middle of the sequence does the film stabilize, and at that point the creature looked over its shoulder at Patterson (as you see in the frame above). Patterson’s film and some plaster casts of footprints eventually made their way to various members of the scientific community, but scientists tend not to be terribly interested in phenomena that don’t accrue evidence—and one shaky Cine-Kodak film sequence and some casts don’t count. The few scientists that deigned to comment on Patterson’s claims pointed out simply that primates—and Bigfoot certainly appeared to be one—don’t have hairy breasts. Yeah, we know—your buddy once knew a Belgian chick that did, but excepting her, primates’ mammaries are hairless. Patterson’s Bigfoot had pendulous breasts, making it female, and those breasts were fur covered, making the creature a hoax.
For scientists, all the film analysis claiming Patterson’s Bigfoot was real meant little. Contradictions of established scientific patterns must come with proof, and Patterson had nothing to explain why his Bigfoot violated a universal rule of primate physiology. But he swore on his deathbed in 1972 that his film was authentic. Robert Gimlin said the same for decades, wavering slightly only in 1999, when he admitted, “…I’m an older man now...and I think there could have been the possibility [of a hoax]. But it would have to be really well planned by Roger.” In the end, we may never know what happened that day. Scientific evidence supporting a genuine Bigfoot encounter is lacking, yet nobody has come forward with irrefutable proof of a hoax. The only analysis of the event must rely on the film, but the original negative is lost. Only Roger Patterson knew the truth, and he took that with him to the grave.
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The headlines that mattered yesteryear.
1921—Chanel No. 5 Debuts
Gabrielle Bonheur "Coco" Chanel, the pioneering French fashion designer whose modernist philosophy, menswear-inspired styles, and pursuit of expensive simplicity made her an important figure in 20th-century fashion, introduces the perfume Chanel No. 5, which to this day remains one of the world's most legendary and best selling fragrances. 1961—First American Reaches Space
Three weeks after Russian cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first human to fly into space, U.S. astronaut Alan Shepard completes a sub-orbit of fifteen minutes, returns to Earth, and is rescued from his Mercury 3 capsule in the Atlantic Ocean. Shepard made several more trips into space, even commanding a mission at age 47, and was eventually awarded the Congressional Space Medal of Honor. 1953—Hemingway Wins Pulitzer
American author Ernest Hemingway, who had already written such literary classics as The Sun Also Rises, A Farewell to Arms, and For Whom the Bell Tolls, is awarded the Pulitzer Prize for fiction for his novella The Old Man and the Sea, the story of an aging Cuban fisherman who struggles with a giant marlin far out in the Gulf Stream. 1970—Mass Shooting at Kent State
In the U.S., Ohio National Guard troops, who had been sent to Kent State University after disturbances in the city of Kent the weekend before, open fire on a group of unarmed students, killing four and wounding nine. Some of the students had been protesting the United States' invasion of Cambodia, but others had been walking nearby or observing from a distance. The incident triggered a mass protest of four million college students nationwide, and eight of the guardsmen were indicted by a grand jury, but charges against all of them were eventually dismissed. 2003—Suzy Parker Dies
American model and actress Suzy Parker, who appeared the films Funny Face and Kiss Them for Me, was the first model to earn more than $100,000 a year, and who was a favorite target of the mid-century tabloids, dies at home in Montecito, California, surrounded by family friends, after electing to discontinue dialysis treatments.
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