The Memorial Day Bigfoot Footage, Chopaka Lake (1996)

Chopaka Lake lies in Okanogan County, north-central Washington, five and a half miles south of the Canadian border. It is a remote fly-fishing lake with a Department of Natural Resources campground. On Memorial Day weekend it fills up.

In 1996 Owen and Lori Pate were among the campers, with Lori's father, Larry Spiry. In a report to the BFRO, filed in 2001, Owen counted seven people camping and fishing.

Sunday, 26 May 1996. A woman in the group pointed to a spot on the hillside. That was where "the thing" had been. As the description went on, the creature stood up behind a bush about 75 yards away. It stared at the group. Then it ran into the woods.

Owen told Lori to turn on the camcorder and scan the hillside. Two to three minutes later it reappeared, about 100 yards further up the steep slope. Lori recorded about 22 seconds. In Spiry's words, it "ran across the hill, not at a pace that you would expect BF's to run." It "kind of ran in a spurt, and slowed down to a walk." As it left their sight, the tape caught a howl.

Judging against the fence line, Owen put it at 6.5 to 7 feet tall and "wide at the shoulders." A fisherman who reported a separate sighting a few days earlier estimated about 7 feet. Under the trees there was a cleared area and small bones. No footprints.

The clip became Exhibit 8 of Sasquatch: Legend Meets Science, broadcast on 9 January 2003. Doug Hajicek of Whitewolf Entertainment sent a forensic team to the hillside. Measuring against fixed objects in the background, they put the figure at 5.3 feet tall, running at 8.56 mph with a 4.25 foot stride. University of Washington sprinter Derek Prior ran at 17.1 mph. Rick Noll's enhancements showed the head appearing to rise near the end, which supporters read as an adult lifting a young one onto its back. Jeff Meldrum saw something else: "Also discernible were unmistakable breasts that gyrated with each running step."

In 2007 Daniel Perez took the footage apart in Skeptical Briefs. The gait, Perez wrote, was "strikingly like that of a man." The figure moved at "a little more than half the speed" of the sprinter. M.K. Davis had reported a green base coat under brown fibre, which Perez said fits a cheap dyed ape suit. The audio, left out of the broadcast, was "both illuminating and revealing." It carries the line "looks like a white boy to me," which Perez attributes to Fred Bradshaw of Elma, a Bigfoot enthusiast the Pates never mentioned. Larry Lund called the footage "pretty terrible." Grover Krantz left it out of the 1999 revision of Big Footprints.

Spiry says about 30 people saw the crossing, out of 70 to 100 at the site. Derek Freel interviewed the fisherman 11 years later and concluded the sighting was genuine. The OregonBigfoot author, who has worn a gorilla suit while filming a documentary, says no one in a suit could cross that steep ground that way. No one has confessed. No costume has been found.

In 2010 Fact or Faked: Paranormal Files brought a Syfy team to Chopaka Lake, and Austin Porter ran the route against the clock. Owen Pate died in a one-car crash near Ravensdale, Washington, on 30 September 2011, aged 56. Some in the Bigfoot community have called the clip the second-best Bigfoot footage after the Patterson-Gimlin film.