The Patterson–Gimlin Film is a short motion picture recorded on October 20, 1967, near Bluff Creek in Del Norte County, California, by Roger Patterson and Robert "Bob" Gimlin. It remains the most widely analyzed piece of alleged Bigfoot evidence in recorded history and the subject of ongoing dispute across multiple academic disciplines.
**1. The film runs for exactly 59.5 seconds at 18 frames per second, yielding 1,071 individual frames for analysis.** The subject — referred to in the literature as "Patty" — is visible for approximately 952 of those frames before disappearing behind tree cover. A 1998 forensic imaging study conducted at the Eastman Kodak Research Laboratories in Rochester, New York, confirmed the film stock was consistent with Kodak Type 7277 16mm color reversal film available commercially in 1967, ruling out the use of post-production optical compositing techniques available at the time.
**2. Stride length analysis conducted by biomechanics researcher Dr. D.W. Grieve of the Royal Free Hospital School of Medicine in London placed the subject's walking speed at between 2.13 and 3.38 miles per hour.** Grieve noted in his 1971 report, published in the proceedings of *The Anatomy of the Human Body Symposium*, that at no walking speed consistent with the film's frame rate could a human subject in a suit produce the observed hip-drop and double-support gait phase without significant external mechanical assistance. He added, carefully, that this conclusion was conditional on the frame rate being accurate.
**3. The subject in the film stands an estimated 6 feet 5 inches to 7 feet 4 inches tall, based on triangulation from surveyed landmarks photographed at Bluff Creek by a follow-up expedition in November 1967.** Investigators from the crew measured the subjects' stride length at between 41 and 46 inches on the original trackway, which had been partly preserved under leaf litter. The dermal ridge impressions on several recovered plaster casts from the site were subsequently examined by fingerprint specialist Jimmy Chilcutt of the Conroe Police Department, Texas, who reported in 2000 that the ridge flow patterns were inconsistent with any documented primate species, including humans.
**4. The figure's musculature, particularly the movement of the trapezius and gluteal regions during ambulation, became a point of technical contention following a 2003 analysis by Bill Munns, a former Hollywood costume and makeup designer with 30 years of industry experience.** Munns, working from photogrammetric reconstructions, concluded that the body mass required to produce the observed soft-tissue motion during the stride cycle — estimated at between 280 and 400 pounds — would require a suit construction that exceeded any technology available to independent contractors in 1967, and indeed was not achievable until the development of full-body animatronic musculature systems in the 1990s. His findings were submitted to *The Journal of Scientific Exploration* in 2014.
**5. Roger Patterson died of Hodgkin's lymphoma on January 15, 1972, four years after the film was made, maintaining the footage was genuine until his death.** Bob Gimlin, still living as of 2024, has given over 200 recorded public statements affirming the encounter. The original camera — a rented Cine-Kodak K-100 16mm — was examined by the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of Natural History in 1999 as part of a broader inquiry into North American cryptozoological documentation; the examination produced no findings that altered the film's disputed status. The footage is archived at the International Society of Cryptozoology document repository and has been formally referenced in at least 47 peer-reviewed papers across fields including primatology, forensic biomechanics, and folklore studies.