The only thing less impressive than Greg Long’s skills as a writer are his skills as an investigator.
In The Making of Bigfoot writer and self-professed journalist Greg Long sets out to uncover the truth about the famous Patterson-Gimlin film. The Bigfoot film. Captured in the late 1960′s the film features about forty seconds of an unknown bi-pedal creature walking across a creek in the middle of the woods. Allegedly filmed in Northern California by two amateur Bigfoot hunters (Roger Patterson and Bob Gimlin) it has been the subject of much controversy since its release forty years ago. Greg Long decides to put all the questions and controversy to rest, once and for all and by the end of the book he is satisfied that he’s done exactly that.
Let me be clear though, if I handed in The Making of Bigfoot as a term paper in University I would receive it back to me, almost immediately, chalk-full of red pen.
Since the controversy surrounding the infamous film revolves around the question of whether or not it was a hoax, Long’s decided approach was to interview those close to the film’s creators, Patterson and Gimlin. Of course, lending to the film’s controversy is the fact that Roger Patterson died of cancer shortly after the film was made (in fact he was suffering from a remission during the period of time in which he filmed the “creature”) and Bob Gimlin, supposedly tired of the publicity, has refused interviews since shortly after Patterson died. With those who actually made the film not talking Long’s task was a decidedly difficult one, he had to gather material evidence and witness testimony from second-hand sources.
Indeed, written as a kind of road trip diary, much of the book is comprised of Greg and his wife Pat traveling up and down the Northwestern United States interviewing anyone with a connection to Roger Patterson and the Bigfoot film. Quickly, the book takes its fatal turn.
What separates Greg Long’s effort from real journalism is simple. Early on in the book, indeed in the first pages, Long has already made up his mind about Roger Patterson. He is a crook and a con-man. Based on character sketches from those that knew him, Long quickly concludes that, absent of any shred of a motive, Patterson faked the famous film.
The sketch painted by Long’s witnesses presents a Roger Patterson that can be interpreted, I would argue, in two different ways. Long’s interpretation largely ignores an overwhelming amount of the information that he himself gathered.
Long argues that because Patterson was bad with money—constantly borrowing from friends and not paying them back—he was a thief and a crook. He argues that because Patterson never had a job and instead bounced from invention to invention, money-making scheme to money-making scheme, often bringing along friends to help finance his adventures, that he was a con-man. These interpretations of the evidence, from a very early point in the book, colour Long’s entire endeavour.
Instead, I would interpret Patterson in an entirely different light. Based on the same witness statements that Long relies on, I see Patterson as an inventor, an entrepreneur, and an artist. Born into extreme poverty, Patterson never had a real handle on how to use and hold onto money. He was a rodeo cowboy, a performer, and was constantly thinking up new wild ideas and schemes but lacked the commitment and dedication to see them through. In his wake he left a trail of half-finished ideas, half-baked schemes, and a lot of debtors but he wasn’t a crook, he wasn’t a thief, he was a product of a very active imagination, with a bad grip on bookkeeping. Long, a working class man himself, takes an obvious affront to Patterson’s lifestyle, he points out several times that Patterson is somehow less reliable of a person because he never held down a job or because he didn’t use money wisely. The only evidence that Patterson ever intentionally cheated anybody is in Greg Long’s imagination. An assumption, from the evidence, that being raised in poverty damned Patterson to having a difficult time handling his finances is a far more reasonable conclusion to draw.
Indeed, Long wields dangerous prejudices against Roger Patterson and, I would strongly argue, his conclusions, made hastily at an early stage in the investigation, clearly taint the rest of his research.
But, if it were down to mere prejudice against the lead figure in his investigation perhaps I could look past that. After all, we all bring biases and prejudices into our work. It’s difficult to have a perfectly open mind. But Long is guilty of far more than simple bias against one of the actors in the Bigfoot drama.
Greg Long is arrogant and his kind of self-righteous, crusader mentality appears, like his thick bias, in the very early pages of The Making of Bigfoot. In a mere breath Long accuses the entire “Bigfoot community” of a vast global conspiracy to cover up the truth about Roger Patterson and his Bigfoot film. Without even a whiff evidence Long repeats this claim several times over throughout the book. Supposedly ignorant of the numerous books, films, and lectures that have been presented on the subject of debunking the film and the person, Long repeats his claim over and over that he is the single person to uncover the truth that he is providing us with the “inside story”.
More so, Long’s real folly is his claim to have found the “man in the suit”. In the course of his research Long runs into Bob Heironimus, an associate of Roger Patterson and Bob Gimlin and the man that claims to have worn the ape suit in the famous Bigfoot film. Realizing that he may finally have the nail to put into the film’s coffin, Long jumps head-long into Heironimus’ story.
Now let me just say, as an aside, that Greg Long does some excellent investigative work. I truly don’t want to take away from all of the hours and the effort that he put into his book. What I take offense with, and indeed what spoils the whole thing, is his incredible bias and arrogance. I could write a great essay on the Boer War in South Africa but if I take the opinion, before I’ve barely begun, that the British were in the right then I’m obviously going to neglect a lot of the facts that lend themselves to the Dutch.
In the case of Bob Heironimus’ story, Long makes up his mind far too soon and ignores some crucial pieces of information. Between the film and the interviews with Long, Heironimus has had thirty years to tell his story and he hasn’t. Long ignores the fact that in this huge span of time Heironimus has had ample opportunity to do his research, to look into the facts and figures of the Patterson film, and to invent a plausible story of his own. Heironimus, Long argues, can walk just like Bigfoot. But Long again neglects the fact that he’s had thirty years to study and perfect the walk. Heironimus tells a convincing tale of how he was roped into playing the Bigfoot character but, on a map, cannot even provide the location of where the film was made.
To understand the extend to which Long’s bias clouds his investigation it’s important to realize that, despite being accused of a global conspiracy, less than a decade after the film was released Rene Dahinden, a famous Bigfoot enthusiast, comments on his own investigation into the film in his book Sasquatch. Dahinden, who did extremely extensive ground research immediately following the film, concluded that there were a number of people claiming to have worn the suit—Heironimus included—and that Bob himself, even immediately after the filming, couldn’t nail down the film site’s location. Instead, Long is acting as if he has just discovered these claims. Ignorance of facts like these, in my opinion, is inexcusable journalism.
As The Making of Bigfoot proceeds Long’s argument develops around his two main pieces of evidence. First, that Roger Patterson was a liar, a cheat, and a crook. He wanted to make money with his Bigfoot scheme and that was reason enough to fake a film. Second, Long believed that he had proof that someone, Bob Heironimus, wore the Bigfoot suit. For him it was case closed.
But enter Phillip Morris. Morris, now an industry leader in costume manufacturing, was at the time of the Patterson film an amateur television personality and part-time costume designer, creating ape costumes from a shop in his basement. Morris explains to Long that Patterson contacted him in the late 1960′s looking for an ape costume to “have some fun” with. In the course of Long’s thorough interview Morris explains how he made the costumes, how they were worn, and how he’s positive that the Bigfoot in Patterson’s film was a man wearing one of his costumes. While Long passes off this interview, near the end of his book, as a relatively mundane occurrence and frames it as the final nail in the Patterson film’s coffin, there are a number of concerns—large ones—that he merely glosses over.
The first huge concern is the description of the costume itself and how it was worn. The in-depth description provided by Morris, who claims to have made the costume, differs significantly from the description of Bob Heironimus, who claims to have worn it. Differences involving whether or not there was a zipper and how the arms, hands, and feet were attached are substantial. Incredibly, Long makes absolutely no mention of these gross differences instead settling for the fact that since he found someone who claims, without any material evidence, to have made the costume for Patterson, he must be telling the truth. Nor does Long bother to question or revisit Heironimus’ claims about how the suit fit or was worn in light of the new ostensibly damning evidence from Morris.
What’s more, Long ignores substantial evidence which arose in the aftermath of the Bigfoot film. Despite claiming that an international conspiracy was covering up the truth of the Patterson film, comments to Bigfoot investigators (investigating the veracity of the film!) from major production outfits like Disney and Universal Studios were unanimous in the fact that such a costume—the Bigfoot costume—could not have been produced commercially at that time (the late 1960′s). Interestingly, despite the world’s leading motion picture companies claiming that it would be impossible to create Bigfoot, Long is ready and willing to believe that an amateur costume maker created the suit in his basement.
The tipping point in The Making of Bigfoot came for me near the closing pages of the book. Long, in a video-cassette-fueled tirade, rails against just about everybody in the Bigfoot field, people who have “let themselves be persuaded” to believe in Bigfoot. Truly, this isn’t Greg Long the journalist or Greg Long the investigator, enter Greg Long the scientist!
Egged on by his ever submissive wife, Pat, Greg fast-forwards, pauses, and slow-motions his way to his own seemingly plausible conclusions about Patterson’s Bigfoot. Ignoring all of his collected evidence and hard-earned interviews he goes on to mock and shame professionals who have attempted to recreate the Bigfoot walk, and professors who have come out in supportive of the ape-like behaviour Patterson’s creature exhibits. Long, who in this scene knows better than all of these experts and career academics, methodically proves to his wife and, in turn the reader, why they are all wrong.
Despite tenured academics, following intense motion-tracking gait analysis, claiming that the Bigfoot walk could not be replicated by humans Long assures us that even he can walk just like Bigfoot. Despite tenured academics, using high-powered microscopes in University labs to analyze the original film footage for minute facial details, Long claims that he can see the eyes of Heironimus behind the Bigfoot mask. Despite experiments which have proven, conclusively, the approximate weight a person or creature would have to be to leave footprints at the depth of those found at the film site (they’d have to be very heavy), Long claims that anyone could just stomp really hard and leave those marks.
It’s an episode indicative of the pages that came before it. It’s inexcusable, absolute arrogance. It’s a simmering to the surface of long-held beliefs and tensions that Long kept buried down inside throughout his interviews and throughout his research which, as I’ve argued, effected his perspective from the start. It’s Long’s extreme bias.
Whether or not there is such a thing as Bigfoot, whether the Patterson-Gimlin film is a hoax or an authentic piece of evidence, Greg Long has, unfortunately, proved nothing.
While I commend Long for his tireless work, his biases, his prejudices, and his arrogance get in the way of any real conclusions. Instead, Long’s conclusions are based on his gut feelings, his opinions, and tainted by his bias against the character of Roger Patterson, and towards the seemingly truthful nature of his Bigfoot, Bob Heironimus. Long ignores key pieces of information, he draws hasty conclusions, and he makes vast unsubstantiated claims. In the end, while getting some of the detective work right, Greg Long fails to produce anything resembling a reasonable conclusion and, from me, receives a failing grade.
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