The Great North IMAX Footage

Great North, known in French as Le Grand Nord, is a giant-screen IMAX documentary about the Arctic. Hydro-Québec produced it with the Swedish Museum of Natural History and Imagica Corporation of Japan. Its subject was the caribou. By July 1999 the crew had visited Nunavik four times in a year, working from a helicopter base at Kuujjuaq. They had filmed the rut, the calving and caribou with their young. Each IMAX camera weighed about 45 kg and needed three operators. Quebec government caribou biologist Serge Couturier helped co-director Martin J. Dignard find a migrating herd. The film premiered in Montreal in early February 2001.

A river in northern Quebec. The caribou are on the move. Some are swimming, others are running. Then something else is in the frame. A dark figure near the herd, "more upright" than a bear, appears to run on two legs. TMZ described "a shadowy figure running upright behind a herd of caribou." PopCulture wrote that it "seems to be chasing or interacting with the beasts." It is small, obscured by distance. Then, as iHeart's Dave Basner put it, "It ducks down below a small ridge and disappears."

Nobody on the riverbank saw it. The figure exists only on film. William "Bill" Reeve, co-director and one of three directors of photography, said he did not notice it until about 15 years after filming.

Around 2016, Reeve was interviewed by the YouTube channel ThinkerThunker. He was firm about his crew. "There was no one on camera except for myself at the riverside," he said. "There's absolutely no way we would put a human being in that peril." What about locals? "Absolutely not. There were no strangers for hundreds of miles of where we were."

He described a skeleton crew of nine, with two helicopters sometimes used to reposition the herds. A crew member who walked into a shot, he reportedly said, would have to buy the beers that night. It would be bad protocol.

Sceptics offered their own answers. Reddit commenters suggested it was likely a hunter, a guy with a backpack, or a person with a baby. The most common reading is simply a crew member in frame. Reeve rejected that.

A bear is the other candidate, and here the record splits. iHeart and TMZ report Reeve calling a bear highly unlikely. The site was at the "northern limit of their range," he said, and "bears run on all fours, not upright." Wikipedia instead says Reeve thought it "could not have been a human but was possibly a bear." Both versions agree that no bears were seen during filming.

Bigfoot researchers see something else. The Instagram account Squatch Me Now described "a large bipedal creature stalking the caribou," adding: "Seems unlikely that the production insurance company would allow a crew member to put themselves in a place." No one has alleged a hoax. No official investigation has ever been made.

July 2024. A Reddit user, u/truthisfictionyt, posted the clip to r/bigfoot. The figure, the poster wrote, "can be seen running alongside the Caribou." Within days, iHeartMedia stations, TMZ, PopCulture, Outdoors.com and Yahoo Entertainment were running the story. The case now sits in Wikipedia's Bigfoot article.

It joins a small family of cases in which professional cameras caught something nobody saw at the time. The river has never been named. The figure has never been identified.