If he ever wants to do a more accurate piece, the front needs a bit more development. LOL!

No malice intended and none given.

The area is rugged and dark, even in the daytime, as it is heavily forested. At that time the only road was a narrow dirt road going across the mountain, and there were no residences on the mountain itself; it was property owned by coal mines. Lots of old mine works existed and in some of those, bones were found. As more and more residents encountered the creature, it became known as the Ball Fork Monster.

People were afraid to go out after night. Coon hunters reported seeing someting huge and bipedal, at least eight feet tall, with eyes that glowed in the dark. The local newspaper urged people to keep their children close to home.

The sightings became more and more frequent and they grew more detailed. People began reporting the monster from different areas. Some claimed to have had close encounters. Some of the reports came from very credible witnesses. For awhile there was a sort of hysteria about the monster that gripped the area. People were scared to death. Some people went out into the hills hunting for the monster. This went on for several months. I was a teenager at the time and I remember the Ball Fork Monster very well.

Then a local good ole boy fessed up. He was a good-humored sort who liked to go up in the hills at night and kick back with a case or two. He was one of those happy-go-lucky fellas whom in older days might have been referred to as a town drunk. He thought it would be fun to stir things up a bit (not too much exciting happens here, and even less 30 years ago). There had been a lot of Bigfoot sightings out west that had been reported in the evening news.

So he made up a monster just for kicks and giggles.

He had a head from an old werewolf costume. As time went on he made a pair of feet (for making footprints) out of an old pair of mining boots strapped to boards. He put some beef bones and I think maybe a pig skull in an old mine. He went out at night and let out some scary howls and roars, etc. He was actually one of the first people who reported encountering the “Bigfoot-like” creature. He only stopped when he got shot at one night. He figured it had gone far enough.

The strange thing is, people did not want to believe that the Ball Fork Monster was not real. They did not want to feel that they had been just been duped … especially those who had sworn that they had close encounters and whose descriptions of said encounters were vivid. Finally Blue Eyes (his nickname; I won’t give out the guy’s real name) took his monster paraphenalia in to the local newspaper to prove that he had been the monster. The sightings stopped.

But even now, some people swear that there must have really been a Ball Fork Monster. Human nature: Stories grow with repeated telling, and we WANT to believe.

That is one of the reasons that I am skeptical. I saw first hand how easily something that something “mysterious” can be made to seem so real.

If Bigfoot by whatever name does exist, then sooner or later a body or an undisputable living specimen will turn up.

I just think that the questions that have arisen about the Patterson film mean that it cannot be used as conclusive evidence for the existence of Bigfoot. More evidence - unambiguous evidence - is needed.

By the way, I believe that the most in-depth program I have seen refuting the Patterson film was an episode of Unsolved History on the Discovery Channel, if I remember correctly.

Kittenz, you decided after one article not to believe your own eyes? Oh well…

I hold as a tenet that, article or no article, Patty was utterly impossible to fake in 1967, and remains so to this day.

Musculature and stride cannot be faked by a mere human being. Now, unless they found a real 1,957-pound, 7′3 1/2″ human female and pasted fur on her…

In which case I’m DYING to meet her.

P.S. Kittenz: Check out the herniated muscle on Patty’s right thigh. Do you imagine fakers would have thought of that detail? Impossible.

So has that been disproven? I mean, were the “hoaxers” actually lying about perpetrating a hoax after all? This is another example of how much damage has been done to the research of Bigfoot. Many people have heard the same thing because of that one reporter who got Ray Wallace confused with Roger Patterson. There was another pathetic attempt to recreate the Patterson/Gimlin film in 1997 (30 years after the original) on location at Bluff Creek, CA. Even the ones who did the recreation didn’t seem impressed with what they ended up with. I can’t recall the name of the documentary. But it aired on TLC & had an interview with a very interesting character who claims bigfoot has left him large pieces of bark in return for not bothering them.

What we need is irrefutable physical evidence, including DNA evidence, that would prove the existence of Sasquatch and its relation to the rest of the apes. I keep an open mind because there is SOMETHING driving these sightings, and many of the sightings are very credible. But an open mind must be tempered with a healthy dose of skepticism.