---
title: "A reel found in a locked safe may finally explain the famous 1967 Bigfoot film"
url: https://badiyaa.com/capturing-bigfoot-documentary-patterson-gimlin-film-new-footage/
published: 2026-10-12T09:47:10+01:00
modified: 2026-10-12T09:47:10+01:00
section: Entertainment
publisher: Badiyaa
---

# A reel found in a locked safe may finally explain the famous 1967 Bigfoot film

The documentary Capturing Bigfoot centres on a 40-second clip from 1966 that its director says shows a rehearsal. It reaches Prime Video on October 20.

For almost 60 years, about a minute of shaky film has kept an argument alive. Shot in October 1967 at Bluff Creek in northern California by Roger Patterson and Bob Gimlin, the Patterson–Gimlin film shows a large, dark, upright figure striding across a sandbar and glancing back at the camera. Believers call it the best evidence that Bigfoot exists. Sceptics have always called it a man in a suit.

A new documentary, *Capturing Bigfoot*, says it has found something neither side had seen: a reel of 16mm film, locked in a safe for decades, that appears to show a rehearsal.

## What the film claims

Directed by Marq Evans, the 103-minute documentary premiered at South by Southwest in March and arrives on Amazon Prime Video on October 20. It is less a monster hunt than a portrait of the people around the famous footage.

The new material came from Teresa Brooks, a film instructor, who found the reel in her late father’s safe and handed it to Evans in 2022. Her father, Norm Johnson, had worked at a Boeing film lab in the years when the 1967 footage was made. Digitised, the reel revealed a roughly 40-second clip developed in 1966 that, the film argues, shows a trial run of the walking figure a year before the “real” encounter.

The documentary also features Patterson’s son, Clint, who says his mother told him the sighting was staged; Bob Heironimus, who has long said he wore the suit; and voices from the other side, including the anthropologist Jeff Meldrum, who has argued the creature’s movement is hard to fake. Evans says no AI was used anywhere in the film: “We’re 100 per cent confident in what we have.”

## Our take on the clip and the debate

This local TV segment is a clear, sober introduction, built around Clint Patterson, and it is worth nine minutes of anyone’s time. It does not try to settle the question on air, which is the right call for a short news piece.

What makes the story interesting is how little the new footage is likely to change some minds. The comments underneath split along familiar lines: some viewers point to the figure’s proportions and gait as impossible to fake, others say the rehearsal settles it. Bigfoot researchers have already questioned whether any newly surfaced footage can be trusted in an age of AI, even though the reel predates digital video by decades.

That is the documentary’s real subject: not whether a creature roams the Pacific Northwest, but why a piece of evidence, once people have built their identities around it, becomes almost impossible to dislodge. Some critics who have seen it describe it as balanced and compassionate towards everyone involved, including the believers.

Patterson died in 1972 and cannot answer for himself. Viewers can judge the new reel for themselves from October 20.

## Further reading

- [Patterson–Gimlin film — Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patterson%E2%80%93Gimlin_film)

- [Capturing Bigfoot — Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capturing_Bigfoot)

- [Bigfoot — Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bigfoot)

- [Willow Creek, California — Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Willow_Creek,_California)

*Image: Bob Doran from Arcata, USA, CC BY 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons*

*This article was produced with AI assistance and reviewed by our Editorial Desk. [How we work](/editorial-policy/).*