Did the man who created Spock's ears also create Bigfoot?

John Chambers was a masterful special effects makeup artist, best known for creating the ears of Mr. Spock on the original Star Trek series and for his groundbreaking work on the Planet of the Apes movies. But Chambers found other, stranger uses for his unique talents, far from Hollywood...

Chambers is probably the only person to have won an Academy Award and commendation for his work with the CIA. For years he secretly worked for the US government, creating Mission Impossible-style makeup jobs to transform agents so they could venture into hostile territory undetected. (He played a crucial role in the CIA plan that managed to sneak six hostages out of Iran in 1979.) He also designed lifelike prosthetics for soldiers who had been disfigured in combat, an accomplishment he reportedly regarded as the proudest of his entire career.

But there is yet another twist to Chambers' story. For many years, there's been gossip around Hollywood that the "Bigfoot" seen in the infamous Patterson-Gimlin footage is actually the work of Chambers. Click to see it here:



In 2001, Chambers died at the Motion Picture and Television Fund retirement home in Woodland Hills. He went to his grave denying he'd made the Bigfoot seen in the film, although two of his friends and proteges - makeup wizard Rick Baker and director John Landis - have said that Chambers created the suit. Baker later recanted, saying he no longer believed the rumor was true, but many other effects artists have gone on record saying they believe the suit was Chambers' work.

We don't know for sure that Chambers created Bigfoot. But we do know that Chambers had piles of monster suits in storage, and often quickly threw together furry monsters out of spare gorilla parts for TV shows like The Outer Limits and Lost in Space. He was also, by many accounts, quite a prankster.

And it's not like this would have been the first Bigfoot hoax he'd been a part of...

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