I tracked the chronological and geographical distribution of how the story had developed from my emails and talk with Steve Young at the Seattle Times, to the “death of Bigfoot” stupidity on the West Coast to the East Coast versions, which then skipped to the English and Scottish papers where the link between Wallace’s wife-as-Bigfoot films first became confused with the Patterson-Gimlin footage. Then I pointed out how the Scottish dispatch was picked up by the San Francisco and other California papers and the two film stories were merged in the American media’s mentality.

My analysis and critique of the media was to be presented at the Willow Creek symposium by me. But then, due to some local disagreements about the BFRO’s role in inviting people, and the lack of power John Green had in supporting my talk, I was “uninvited” because I was from the East Coast and not a “West Coast” researcher (despite my 40 plus years of bi-coastal investigations). That’s a whole other story, and I won’t go into it deeply here. But I was shocked to see that my media analysis began showing up on websites and in others’ talks, despite my initial discoveries of how the “mangling” occurred and actually evolved.

“The Wallaces had said, as just about every Sasquatch investigator already knew, that Ray had made fake Bigfoot photos and movies, featuring his wife wearing a fur costume. But they also said that Ray had nothing to do with the famous Bigfoot movie taken by Roger Patterson at Bluff Creek in 1967. The media fire stormed however, and eventually made Mrs. Wallace the subject of the Patterson movie, with Ray as the cameraman.”

And here’s one such mangled version, by John M. Hubbell from the San Francisco Chronicle, 12/7/02, titled, “Bigfoot backers mourning
But they remain Yeti loyalists despite family’s admission of hoax”:
“Ray L. Wallace was Bigfoot,” his son Michael told the Seattle Times in a story published Thursday, a claim few sons can make beyond metaphor. “The reality is, Bigfoot just died.”
And he said 1967′s famous “Patterson-Gimlin Film” — a grainy home movie that allegedly captures a startled specimen fleeing a streambed — may be only his obliging mother wearing a monkey suit. [The Seattle Times obituary didn’t say that—the writer for the SF Chronicle mashed it together in his mind--RK.]
The elder Wallace had told the film’s shooters where they could spot the Sasquatch, said Ray Crowe, founder of the International Bigfoot Society in Hillsborough, Ore.
But, that’s unlikely, since Wallace was not in the area, having moved to Toledo, WA several years prior to 1967. (According to the first page of Ch. 3 of Patterson’s book—on p. 73 of the 2005 reprint titled “The Bigfoot Film Controversy.”) Toledo is 511 miles from Willow Creek—a ten-hour drive—according to Google Maps.

Perhaps the expert who said the Patterson family had admitted a hoax could be requested to issue a retraction of her libelous (to the Patterson family) statement.