Likewise, but the burden of proof is on the claimant.
So? Hoaxers have been known to spend money on their hoaxes. Patterson rented a professional movie camera with expensive color film. He did not just happen to be there with a Super-8 home movie camera. Patterson had an advance from the AME film company that he used to rent the camera and make the ape suit. And he reported $200,000 in the first year of the bigfoot business he started. http://skeptoid.com/episodes/4375
From the same wikipedia article you copied . . .
In 1995,[126] almost three decades after the Patterson–Gimlin filming, Greg Long,[127] a technical writer for a technology firm who had a hobby of investigating and writing about Northwest mysteries, started years of interviewing people who knew Patterson, some of whom described him as a liar and a conman.
The whereabouts of the original is unknown, although there are several speculations, mostly online, as to what happened to it.
Typical objections include: Neither humans nor chimpanzees have hairy breasts as does the figure in the film, and critics have argued these features are evidence against authenticity. Napier has noted that a sagittal crest is "only very occasionally seen, to an insignificant extent, in chimpanzees [sic] females."[159]
- Gimlin. Patterson and Gimlin both denied that they had perpetrated a hoax, but in a 1999 telephone interview with television producer Chris Packham for the BBC's The X Creatures, Gimlin said that for some time, "I was totally convinced no one could fool me. And of course 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 [Patterson]."[249]
- David Daegling, anthropologist, writes that the "more cynical skeptics" see Patterson's luck as "more than a little suspicious: He sets out to make a Bigfoot documentary, then almost literally stumbles across a Bigfoot." Bluff Creek had also been the site of well-known Bigfoot hoaxer Ray Wallace in 1958. In Patterson's book, he mentions meeting with Wallace once.[251] Later, Daegling cites certain features in the film and the storyline as suspicious.[252]
Philip Morris
In 2002, Philip Morris of Morris Costumes (a North Carolina-based company offering costumes, props and stage products) claimed that he made a gorilla costume that was used in the Patterson film. Morris says he discussed his role in the hoax "at costume conventions, lectures, [and] magician conventions"[254] in the 1980s, but first addressed the public at large on August 16, 2002, on Charlotte, North Carolina, radio station WBT-AM.[255] His story was also printed in The Charlotte Observer.[256] Morris claims he was reluctant to expose the hoax earlier for fear of harming his business: giving away a performer's secrets, he said, would be widely regarded as disreputable.[257]
Morris said that he sold an ape suit to Patterson via mail-order in 1967, thinking it was going to be used in what Patterson described as a "prank."[258] (Ordinarily the gorilla suits he sold were used for a popular side-show routine that depicted an attractive woman changing into a gorilla.) After the initial sale, Morris said that Patterson telephoned him asking how to make the "shoulders more massive"[259] and the "arms longer."[260] Morris says he suggested that whoever wore the suit should wear football shoulder pads and hold sticks in his hands within the suit.
As for the creature's walk, Morris said:
The Bigfoot researchers say that no human can walk that way in the film. Oh, yes they can! When you're wearing long clown's feet, you can't place the ball of your foot down first. You have to put your foot down flat. Otherwise, you'll stumble. Another thing, when you put on the gorilla head, you can only turn your head maybe a quarter of the way. And to look behind you, you've got to turn your head and your shoulders and your hips. Plus, the shoulder pads in the suit are in the way of the jaw. That's why the Bigfoot turns and looks the way he does in the film. He has to twist his entire upper body.[261]
Bob Heironimus
Bob Heironimus claims to have been the figure depicted in the Patterson film.[262] Heironimus says he had not previously publicly discussed his role in the hoax because he hoped to be repaid eventually and was afraid of being convicted of fraud had he confessed. After speaking with his lawyer he was told that since he had not been paid for his involvement in the hoax that he could not be held accountable.
A month after watching the December 28, 1998 television special World's Greatest Hoaxes: Secrets Finally Revealed, he went public, via a January 30 press release by his lawyer, Barry Woodard, in a Yakima newspaper story.[263] He stated, "I'm telling the truth. I'm tired after thirty-seven years."[261] Five days later, a second newspaper story reported that his "lawyer's office has been inundated with calls from media outlets . . . . 'We're just sort of waiting for the dust to settle,' he said, explaining he and his client are evaluating offers." He also said, "We anticipate that we will be telling the full story to somebody rather quickly."[264]
Heironimus's name was first publicly revealed, and his allegations first publicly detailed, five years later, in Greg Long's book, The Making of Bigfoot, which includes testimony that corroborates Heironimus' claims:
- Heironimus's relatives (mother Opal and nephew John Miller) claim to have seen an ape suit in Heironimus' car. Opal said she saw the suit two days after the film was shot.[265]
- Russ Bohannon, a longtime friend, says that Heironimus revealed the hoax privately in 1968 or 1969.[266]
- Bernard Hammermeister, another longtime friend, said he was shown an ape suit in Heironimus' car. No date was given by Long for Hammermeister's observation, but it apparently came well after the relatives' observation, as implied by the word "still" in the justification Heironimus gave Hammermeister for requesting his silence: "There was still supposed to be a payola on this thing, and he didn't have it."[267]
Plus there is a long list of people who have studied the film and labeled it a hoax.
http://www.strangemag.com/chambers17.html
My investigation did not lead to the craftsman of the Patterson suit, but one thing is clear -- none of the foremost makeup special effects experts in Hollywood that I interviewed think that the Patterson Bigfoot is anything but a man in a suit. Bigfoot buffs have perpetuated the myth that special makeup effects artists believed that the Patterson film was hard, if not impossible, to fake. This article should lay to rest any notion that makeup experts were generally impressed by the Patterson film.
http://www.bigfootencounters.com/articles/korff04.htm
http://bigfootevidence.blogspot.com/2011/11/breakdown-of-patterson-gimlin-footage.html
