Credulity Lives!

“My god, what do you have to show them before they’ll take it seriously?”

So cried Bigfoot quester René Dahinden in 1967, after scientists at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, along with their counterparts at the Smithsonian, the University of British Columbia and several other notable institutions, unanimously discounted the most famous Bigfoot video in history as a hoax.

That video, filmed in 1967 in northern California by two cowboys named Roger Patterson and Bob Gimlin, is embedded in the North American psyche. Recorded on shaky, hand-held 16mm film, the video shows something that could either be Bigfoot or a man in a gorilla suit marching away from the camera through a gravelly forest clearing. As it passes behind a thigh-high collection of woody debris, the creature looks back toward...