‘The most convincing evidence since Patterson-Gimlin’: Does this Maine video show proof of Bigfoot?

Maine cryptozoologist Loren Coleman's own foot rests on a plaster cast of a Bigfoot footprint found in Bluff Creek, Calif. (BDN file photo)

Maine cryptozoologist Loren Coleman’s own foot rests on a plaster cast of a supposed Bigfoot footprint found in Bluff Creek, Calif. (BDN file photo)

Mainer Bill Brock is the host of a monster-hunting show that has aired on the Discovery Channel and its Destination America sister network, and he’s been searching for Sasquatch — “Bigfoot” — for years.

He told me today the evidence he has seen and heard up in Turner is good. The question is whether it’s too good to be true.

“I’m not telling you that this is Sasquatch,” he said. “I’m telling you we either have a bunch of things that are lining up to be the most convincing evidence since the Patterson-Gimlin video or this is a really amazing hoax.”

To be clear, Brock thinks his witness — a 12-year-old Turner resident — is being truthful. So if it’s a big scam or a case of badly mistaken identities, the boy is as much a victim as anyone else who buys in.

“This really terrified this kid. He was shaking,” Brock said. “I’ve done enough interviews with people who say they’ve seen Sasquatch to know … he was scared. It was almost frightening to watch him deal with it.”

The Patterson-Gimlin video, for reference, was a controversial 1967 motion picture shot by Roger Patterson and Robert Gimlin near Bluff Creek in California depicting what they maintained was Sasquatch. The footage is perhaps the best-known of all Bigfoot imagery and has been widely debated in terms of its authenticity. (See an analysis of that footage by clicking here.)

So let’s get to the Turner evidence.

There’s video of something very clearly walking across this rural stretch of property. There’s audio of a whooping noise. And there are some really clearly defined — and big — humanoid footprints in the granular Turner snow.

Here’s one of the video clips, now enhanced and given a bit of analysis by Brock:

There’s obviously something walking across the back of the shot. Now here’s a longer video put together by Brock featuring some interviews, another stretch of footage potentially showing Bigfoot crossing the property, and shots of those footprints:

Brock called the combination of video footage, the footprints and the audio a “perfect storm” of evidence — so perfect, in fact, that he was cautious about believing it. But as a longtime Bigfoot researcher, he said all of those pieces of evidence were independently — and eerily — similar to other pieces of evidence he’s collected or seen over the years.

Screenshot of Bill Brock's video from Turner (the red footprint outline is something I added to help make it clear what he was looking at there).

Screenshot of Bill Brock’s video from Turner (the red footprint outline is something I added to help make it clear what he was looking at there).

The footprints were similar in dimension to footprints he once studied up in the remote Chain of Ponds area in the northwest corner of the state, and the whooping call picked up on the Turner audio sounds much like the haunting noise captured in the background of an unrelated video segment Brock once made on porcupines.

With the emergence of more technology to capture images and sounds from the forest, many Bigfoot enthusiasts claim the mysterious hairy beast can be identified by a howl-like vocal call.

Witnesses who have claimed to see Bigfoot over the decades have described him — or her, I guess — as a bipedal creature standing between 7 and 10 feet tall, weighing as much as 500 pounds and covered in hair.

An 1886 newspaper article detailed eyewitness reports of a 10-foot-tall hairy “wild man” roaming the forests of northern Maine, and in 1973, multiple people in Durham reported seeing an “upright and chimpanzee-like” being traipsing about in that rural town.

“I’ve had some weird experiences here in Maine,” said Brock, who said he lined the Turner audio wavelengths up with those of the “weird howl” sound in the back of his porcupine video: “They were very close. That was kind of odd.”

“[The Turner footage] has a howl on it, and it sounds just like what you’d hear on [the popular Animal Planet TV show] ‘Finding Bigfoot,’” he said. “Everything that I found out there has seemed to be good. Nobody feels like they’re lying to me. I didn’t find anything that made me think, ‘Yeah, this is completely fake.’ If you keep an open mind about it, why couldn’t the perfect storm happen?”

Brock plans to return to the Turner area Saturday with a full complement of evidence gathering gadgets, hot on the trail of whatever is stomping around barefoot up there.

“I really want to go out and spend more time there and find out what’s going on. I’m going to be deploying a whole bunch of trail cams and putting up a bunch of audio recorders,” he said. “All that together will produce something if there’s something there, whether there’s a Sasquatch out there or a guy walking around in camo.”