Paul Freeman's Blue Mountains Bigfoot video at Deduct Spring, Oregon

Paul Freeman knew the Blue Mountains. He was a former U.S. Forest Service patrolman and, by his son's account, once a butcher and a bodyguard for musicians. In June 1982 he reported a Bigfoot in the Mill Creek watershed near Walla Walla and came back with footprint casts, which caught the interest of Grover Krantz and also drew critics. His son Michael says he went into the woods about five times a week, often from around 4 a.m., camera almost always in hand. On this day he decided to go at the last minute.

Deduct Spring. A remote corner of the Umatilla National Forest in Oregon, where the South Fork Walla Walla River rises. The tape opens with Freeman describing large, man-like tracks in the mud, and he casts a line of fresh juvenile footprints. Near the creek he finds adult tracks, apparently fresh, leading to the water and away from it. He keeps following, and then he hears noises in the brush.

About fifty yards ahead, something enormous lopes through the trees, right to left across the frame, and disappears up a trail. Freeman is breathing hard. "There he goes!" "Jesus!"

Then a second figure. "There's two of 'em!" Accounts of his exact words vary. Freeman seems to have believed he filmed two adults. The second looked oddly shaped to him, perhaps hunchbacked, blurred by distance and tree cover.

Freeman died in 2003. Afterwards Doug Hajicek, producer of Sasquatch: Legend Meets Science and MonsterQuest, studied the tape on an HD screen. He found what he believed was a third, youngest individual. In the latter part of the footage, the second adult appears to stop, lift a juvenile and carry on down the trail. Hajicek believed Freeman never noticed it.

The enhanced version premiered by livestream at Squatch Con Idaho in Caldwell on August 26, 2023, before a panel of Mike Freeman, Jeff Meldrum, Cliff Barackman and Brian King-Sharp. Hajicek has not published his methods.

For years the film was dated 1994. Wikipedia, Backpacker, Outside and Seattle Met all give that year. Michael Freeman and Bigfoot Times say it was shot on August 20, 1992. No 1992 newspaper report has surfaced to settle it. Even the state is argued over, as some accounts place the film in Washington and the family insists on Oregon.

The film's biggest problem is its maker. René Dahinden and Bob Titmus thought Freeman was simply a hoaxer seeking attention. Titmus said he was "positive the Freeman handprints were fake." In 1987, on ABC's Good Morning America, Freeman admitted making fake prints before 1982. His son says it was to show that the real tracks could not be faked.

Bigfoot Times reports that some hair he submitted turned out to be synthetic fibres. The footage itself is shaky and low resolution, shot on eight millimetre tape, and critics suggest a person in a costume. Bill Munns countered that such a suit would have been "nearly impossible" to build in the 1990s. A Metabunk thread noted that no serious sceptical analysis of the film had been done.

Kokanee beer spoofed the footage many times in its TV ads. In 2022 Michael Freeman published Freeman Bigfoot Files, with QR codes linking to about an hour of his father's unheard audio. The case still rests on the same uneasy pairing. A man who admitted faking evidence. And a tape no one has yet taken apart.