Bob Gimlin Releases Statement on New Capturing Bigfoot Documentary

Posted Wednesday, August 12, 2026

By Squatchable.com staff

So, I just stumbled across something pretty fascinating on YouTube that I had to share. A channel called Wild Discovery put up a video diving into something that honestly stopped me in my tracks — Google's most advanced AI was reportedly fed the clearest digital scans of the Patterson-Gimlin film ever produced and asked one simple, direct question: Is this film real? The answer it gave apparently shocked the experts. Not because of what the machine found, but because of what it could not find. That's the part that really got me thinking. For those who need a refresher, the Patterson-Gimlin film is that legendary 59 seconds of footage shot on a handheld 16mm camera back in October 1967 along Bluff Creek in northern California. Roger Patterson and Bob Gimlin were riding through the wilderness when they rounded a bend and came face-to-face with something tall, broad-shouldered, covered head to foot in dark reddish-brown hair, and walking upright across a clearing like it owned the place. Patterson's horse panicked and threw him, but the man still managed to grab his camera and start filming as he stumbled across the creek bank. The footage is shaky, grainy, and absolutely mesmerizing. What makes this AI angle so interesting is that for almost 60 years, no expert on Earth has been able to definitively prove whether the film is real or fake. Biologists have failed. Hollywood costume designers have failed. The world's most stubborn skeptics have failed. Everyone who has ever examined that footage walks away with an answer, and every one of those answers gets contradicted by the next person to look at it. The video also touches on something I think a lot of people forget — Sasquatch didn't just appear out of nowhere in 1967. The indigenous peoples of the Pacific Northwest had been talking about these beings for centuries. They had names for them across many nations and languages — Sasquatch, Skookum, Oma, and dozens more. The descriptions matched across peoples who never even met each other. Something enormous, upright, walking like a person but far larger, covered in hair, avoiding people rather than hunting them. And these weren't framed as spirits or gods — they were described the same way a tribe would describe a bear or a wolf pack. A real thing in the landscape. A practical hazard. When European settlers pushed into those same forests, they started reporting the exact same things. Loggers, miners, trappers — pragmatic, weathered men with no reason to invent a monster — kept describing the same creature. The name "Bigfoot" itself came from a 1950s road construction crew near Bluff Creek who kept finding enormous humanoid footprints pressed into the soft ground overnight, appearing beside the machinery as though something had walked through the site while they slept. A local newspaper columnist reached for a punchy phrase and called it Bigfoot. The name stuck instantly. One thing that really caught my attention in the video was the mention that Bob Gimlin has apparently issued a statement about the new Capturing Bigfoot documentary and specifically the new "66" found footage featured in it. Gimlin has been remarkably consistent over the decades — a rugged, practical outdoorsman who, by most accounts, didn't even share Patterson's fervent belief in what they saw. His skepticism actually made him a useful counterweight to Patterson's certainty. If Gimlin is speaking out about new footage, that's worth paying attention to. The Patterson-Gimlin encounter itself is the kind of story that never gets old. Two men on horseback, one enormous unknown figure in a clearing, separated by a strip of water and an afternoon that would be argued over for the rest of the century. Patterson hit the ground hard when his horse reared, but something years in the making overrode the shock. He scrambled up, tore the camera free, and ran — not away, but toward it. The creature never charged. It never showed aggression. It simply kept walking with that long, deliberate stride, almost indifferent. And then it did the thing that became the single most scrutinized gesture in cryptozoology — it turned, rotated its upper body, and looked back over its shoulder directly toward Patterson. That backward glance has been reproduced, studied, and debated more than almost any other image ever captured on film. And now an AI with no childhood memories of campfire stories, no stake in the outcome, and no ego to bruise has looked at it and apparently come back with an answer that left the experts stunned. I won't spoil the details — the video does a much better job walking through everything than I could in a short summary. But if you've ever wondered whether modern technology could finally crack the case on the most famous piece of footage in the history of the unexplained, this is absolutely worth the watch. The full breakdown is over on the Wild Discovery channel, and trust me, you'll want to hear what the AI actually said.