Before Capturing Bigfoot was a documentary, it was a reel of 16mm film sitting in a family safe in Washington State. The film premieres October 20 on Prime Video, and a Kitsap Sun profile of the people behind it fills in the family story that the trailer only hints at.
“I’m Bigfoot”
In the early 1970s, Norm Johnson tucked his young daughter Teresa into bed in their South Kitsap home. The famous Patterson-Gimlin footage was all over the news and the schoolyard, and she was around nine years old. As he put her to bed, her dad told her not to worry about it, because he was Bigfoot. She slept fine, and the subject barely came up again.
Norm died in 2009. He had worked early on at Boeing, then ran J&J’s Print Shop on Callow Avenue with his wife, Sharon, and he collected coins. Teresa remembered being the one sibling allowed to watch him stack new finds in the family safe, where a reel of film always sat, never discussed. Sharon would not talk about it either. After Sharon died in 2017, Teresa kept the reel, and without a projector she risked mailing it to a Costco photo lab. It came back with a DVD of what had been recorded.
From a Safe to a Film Department
Her children were not interested, but an old friend of Norm’s, Ray Bricker, wrote to her in the fall of 2021 and suggested she share the film. Teresa, who now teaches social sciences at Olympic College, emailed the school’s film program the following summer and asked if anyone wanted to figure out what the reel was. The email landed with Bremerton filmmaker Marq Evans.
Evans had the original footage scanned at higher resolution by a North Carolina company. The scene was believed to be rural Yakima County, and it strongly resembled the Patterson-Gimlin film, the 1967 clip of a tall, furry biped walking in a canyon near the Klamath River. Evans says the Patterson film was dated to fall 1967 through coding on the Kodachrome film stock of that era. By the same method, Norm Johnson’s reel dated to 1966, and Evans thought it was remarkably similar. Are they connected? He says definitely.
The Yakima Connection
Evans read Greg Long’s 2004 book The Making of Bigfoot, then reached out to Long, who shared more than 100 hours of interviews with people around Roger Patterson and Bob Gimlin. One interview that never made the book tied to Norm Johnson through his brother Dave, who lived in Yakima. Evans then used his own Yakima family ties to find people who had been around Patterson in the 1960s, along with Gimlin himself and relatives who had never talked about their father’s fame. Patterson’s son Clint, who lives in Montana, told Evans he had been waiting to get things off his chest. Evans says revisiting the film caused rifts, and that the project is as much about reconciliation as footage.
Norm’s job at Boeing may explain a piece of the puzzle. He worked in the film department in the 1960s and had editing skills and equipment access. The Kitsap Sun says the family gathered to see whether Norm had been involved in what it calls a dress rehearsal of the Bigfoot walk through California. More than 50 relatives attended a private screening at a log cabin in Central Kitsap, and Teresa says the family stood and clapped, many in tears.
What We Still Do Not Know
The filmmakers are guarding the footage closely. Audiences are not allowed to bring phones or wear recording glasses, and so far no leaks have shown up in the Reddit threads. As we noted when the trailer dropped, the director argues the new reel suggests the famous 1967 film was staged. The profile does not say what the reel proves, and Teresa says her own story is not fully unraveled. She does not know why her father kept it secret, and guesses he meant for her to share it after he was gone.
I will say the family angle makes this one different. If it holds up, it points to a very ordinary explanation for the most famous Bigfoot clip ever made. If it does not, a 1966 reel that looks like the 1967 film is still a strange thing to find in a safe. Evans plans a Yakima screening on October 24 and a Bremerton screening at the Roxy Theatre on October 30, if you want to see it on a screen.
I would keep an open mind, but the answer is not in the safe. It is in what the film actually shows, and we have not seen it yet. This is a story about Bigfoot that may end up being about people.
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