The Freeman Bigfoot Video

Who was Paul Freeman? A forest service worker turned Bigfoot hunter who collected plaster casts of prints that displayed dermal ridges. These have been one of Jeff Meldrum's most prized proof of an undocumented creature in the woods of Washington State. The dermal ridges reportedly were not human nor were they ape, but somewhere in between.

The footage above was taken in 1994 by Freeman in Washington State. It's debated over often.

I tend to use the same things that I do when I'm working with ghost witnesses, I begin here with the context in which the event happened. This man had been seeing and hearing things in the woods and finding lots of footprints. He started going out with his video camera and got this footage.

When I look at the film, the things that captures my eyes first is the jumpiness as he's studying the footprints. He then hears something snap in the woods and lifts the camera straight up, dead on one spot in the woods, no longer bouncing, and miraculously of all the places he puts the camera still, it is dead center in the scene of BF walking through the woods. He doesn't pan around trying to find the culprit. He kinds of knows where it's coming from as if it were rehearsed.

Then, he speaks out loud at a fairly normal level "there he goes." I feel like the way he's commenting is to the people who will be viewing it and the wording sounds like he knew this guy was going to come out and walk by--once again feeling rehearsed. That's kind of an odd point of view. If I were alone in the woods and following the tracks and filming them to share and looked up and caught that clearly a BF going by, I'd likely be extremely quiet, hoping it doesn't see me, maybe even step back. There would be no commentary as if an audience will be viewing it later on.

I don't have any reason to wonder about the man's character. I'm sure he had the best of motives for filming this. I do wonder at how it was filmed and how perfectly ideal the viewing was and how he shook the camera the entire time, except the very moment BF stepped out, he was still and following him while he was in sight. So, he had the ability to still the camera for the special shot, but not the rest of it. He gave it the appearance of being natural by shaking the camera, but then stilled it at an opportune moment. If you ever see UFO footage, people desperately try to zoom in or rush to get a better view and end up with sketchy shooting. Not this guy. Once BF goes out of sight, he starts jumping around and filming places that are no where in the vicinity of where BF was. It seemed like he was buying time for someone to get out of sight completely.

I'm not sure about this one. I think I put it in my -- close but no cigar category. The BF's walking style, the context, the way it was shot -- doesn't add up for me. Of all the places in the woods and all the tracks to follow, he managed to be right in the BF's present location, lift his camera and voila--there he is???

What's your take on it?