Bluff Creek, 1967: The Bigfoot Film Nobody Can Explain

In 1967, two men rode into a remote creek bed in Northern California with a rented camera. They came out with less than a minute of film that people are still arguing about.

From The Unexplained, a coloring book of UFOs, cryptids and unsolved mysteries by Pencil Box Press.

What happened

Roger Patterson and Bob Gimlin were in the Bluff Creek area looking for Bigfoot. According to the filmmakers, on October 20, 1967, they came around a bend and saw a large, dark, upright figure walking along the creek. Patterson grabbed the 16mm camera he had rented and started filming.

The whole encounter fills a little under a minute of film. The figure walks away from the camera across the sandbar, and in the most famous moment, it glances back over its shoulder, right at the lens. That single frame has been printed, analyzed and argued over ever since.

The argument

Skeptics say it is a person in a costume, and over the years more than one person has claimed to know who wore it or who made the suit. Believers point to the figure’s walk, its proportions and the way it moves, and argue a suit from that era couldn’t have looked like that.

More than 50 years later, the case has never been settled either way. And the creek is still there, which is why people keep driving out to stand in the same spot.

Real, or a man in a suit?

That is the question that keeps Bluff Creek alive. You don’t have to believe in Bigfoot to find it strange that one short reel of film has outlasted every attempt to close the case.

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Bluff Creek is one of the 45 case files in The Unexplained, a bold and easy coloring book of UFOs, cryptids and unsolved mysteries from Pencil Box Press.