Antimatter Achievement: Scientists Successfully Trap Positrons for Months

0:00Stuart Gary This is space time series 29 episode

0:03 128 full broadcast on 26 October 2026 coming up on Space Time, scientists trap antimatter, successfully holding it for months. Liftoff for Japan's sample return mission to the Red planet. Mars and the Time Lords have demanded, ah, a change in how science understands time. All that and more coming up on, um, Space Time. Welcome to Space Time with Stuart Garret.

0:48 Physicists have successfully trapped an antimatter particle called a positron in an experiment that helped set the stage for one of the toughest tests yet for the standard model of particle physics, the foundation stone of science's understanding of the universe. The new study, reported in the journal Physical Review Letters, could eventually enable the most precise test yet of a fundamental symmetry between electrons and their antimatter counterparts. See, the problem is, equal amounts of matter and antimatter were created in the Big Bang 13.8 billion years ago. However, uh, as matter and antimatter annihilate each other when they come into contact, the universe should have disappeared in a flash

1:27 of gamma ray light almost immediately after it formed. Yet clearly, that didn't happen. And we live in a universe dominated by what we call matter rather than antimatter. The positron is the positively charged antimatter counterpart to the negatively charged electron. According to the standard model, electrons and positrons should be perfect mirror images of each other. So by measuring the positron's magnetic properties with unprecedented precision and then comparing those with the electrons properties, physicists should be able to put this fundamental symmetry to its most stringent test yet. And if the measurements don't match up as expected, that would reveal a crack in the standard model of

2:08 particle physics, offering new clues to enduring mysteries, including why ordinary matter, rather than antimatter, dominates the universe. After first capturing the fast moving particle from radioactive decay, the authors cooled it to nearly absolute zero. They then suspended the particle in a near perfect vacuum, preventing it from touching ordinary matter, an encounter which would cause it to annihilate. By trapping and cooling a positron in this way, the authors created what they're calling a 1 positron, quantum cyclotron. In this state, the positron essentially behaves very much like an artificial atom with quantum energy levels, scientists can precisely control and observe. The study's lead author,

2:50 Gerald Gabriels from Northwestern University, says, if you take an electron and a positron and collide them together, they'll both disappear. They'll annihilate each other. And he says the big mystery of the universe is the fact that the Big Bang should have created equal amounts of matter and antimatter. But if that were true, it would annihilate and we'd be left with nothing. So clearly there's something wrong with the theory, and that's what science is trying to figure out. The standard model of particle physics is a long standing hypothesis describing the fundamental particles and three of the four fundamental forces, the electromagnetic force, the strong nuclear force and the weight weak nuclear

3:26 force. Experiment after experiment has confirmed the model's predictions with extraordinary precision. Yet physicists know the model is not complete. It doesn't explain dark energy or dark matter. Nor can it explain why the observable universe contains overwhelmingly more matter than antimatter. Gabriel says science knows the standard model has to be wrong somewhere, or at least incomplete.

3:51 Nearly everything on Earth is made of just three familiar particles electrons, protons, neutrons. And an antimatter universe instead could be built from their antimatter counterparts, positrons, antiprotons and antineutrons. Gabriel says the simple fact is, if everything on Earth were antimatter, it would be difficult to tell the difference. The fireworks only occur when the two worlds, matter and antimatter, meet. Now, one of the problems with testing all this is that scientists can't simply put a positron into a conventional container.

4:23 That's because touching the container itself, which is normal matter, would cause the antimatter particle to annihilate. So if scientists want to study antimatter, they need to handle it really carefully. So to carefully handle the particle, the authors used a state of the art trap, which combines specialised electric and magnetic fields in order to suspend the positron in a void.

4:44 Sitting in the middle of this container, the positron never touches anything. And because of this setup, uh, the positron in Gabrielle's laboratory has remained trapped for months. Mind you, catching the positron in the first place was its own challenge. Positrons can be generated during radioactive decay of certain atomic nuclei. In this experiment, Gabriels used nuclei from Sodium 22, a rare radioactive isotope of sodium. When the particles emerge from the nuclei, they carry enormous amounts of energy. So the team first needed to slow down the positron and then guide it into the trap's near perfect vacuum. The interior of the trap is cooled to just 0.3 degrees above absolute zero, which is minus

5:26 273.15 degrees Celsius. Gabriels and colleagues also demonstrated that they could precisely manipulate and detect the positron's individual quantum energy states. By delivering carefully tuned microwaves, they added tiny precise amounts of energy to the positron and detected its resulting quantum transitions.

5:47 And that level of control is essential for scientists ultimate goal, measuring the positron's magnetic properties with extraordinary precision and then comparing them with those of an electron. In previous work, Gabriels used a 1 electron quantum cyclotron to measure the electron's magnetic moment to about 1 part in 10 trillion, which is among the most precise measurements ever made for any electron elementary particle.

6:11 Now with the trapped antimatter, Ghebrios plans to make the same kind of quantum measurement with the positron and then put the two results head to head. He says current theory suggests there should be no difference between the two measurements, but if it turns out they're not equal, that would be the biggest discovery in physics in the last century. And needless to say, we'll keep you informed. This is space time still to come.

6:38 Liftoff for Japan's first sample return mission to the red planet. Mars and the Time Lords have demanded a change in how science understands time. All that and more still to come on, uh, space time. Japan's Martian Moons exploration MMX mission is now on its way to the Red Planet's moon Phobos. Following its successful launch from the Tanegashima Space Centre, a thousand kilometres south of Tokyo,

7:27Tim Mendham We have a successful rest of our H3 launch

7:29 vehicle from number 10 with the MMX first custom board from Jackset.

7:33Stuart Gary And 4.5 ton spacecraft

7:36 will arrive at Mars in August next year, spending several years orbiting the 27 kilometre wide potato shaped moon, undertaking readings and searching for appropriate landing sites. In 2029, it'll deploy a small 25 kilogramme four wheeled Land Rover called Itafix, which will descend down to the Phobos surface and undertake preliminary observations before MMX itself drops down at the surface, undertaking several touchdowns in 2030, collecting up to 10 grammes of samples. These will then be loaded onto a return module which will fly back to Earth in 2031, parachuting down into the Woomera rocket range in Outback South Australia for collection by scientists.

8:17 Dr. Sarah Webb from Swinburne University says those samples will help answer key questions about the origins of both Martian moons, Phobos and Deimos. They're either captured asteroids from the nearby main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, or they're the remains of debris ejector, uh, thrown out into orbit following a giant asteroid impact under the Martian surface.

8:39Silvia Mantovanini So this mission, called Martian Moons

8:40 Exploration, or MMX for short, is quite exciting. It's led by the Japanese space agency, and its whole goal is not only to go to Mars to orbit around Phobos, but you actually collect a sample of it and return it back to Earth. Uh, and if successful, this will be the first time ever that a sample has been collected from the Martian planet system and then brought back to Earth for further analysis. So us scientists are, uh, uh, shaking in our boots, getting really excited because this is things that we've been waiting for for decades and it's now within

9:09Stuart Gary critics are going to say it's Phobos, it's

9:12 not Mars. The Moon was chosen because it's easier to land there, it's easy to take off.

9:17Silvia Mantovanini Much easier. And we don't know what Phobos is

9:19 as well. We theorise that it's likely a captured asteroid, but there's also a theory that it is the leftover chunk of Mars that formed because of a giant impact. And so we won't actually know until we get our hands on that material and be able to analyse it in more detail.

9:33Stuart Gary That's one of the first things you learn in

9:34 astronomy school. Is Phobos a chunk of Mars that been blasted into orbit, or is it a captured asteroid?

9:41Silvia Mantovanini Right. It's a mystery that hopefully by

9:43 2035, once we have the sample back on Earth, we might be able to answer. Uh, and then that has a lot of rundown consequences for what we understand about our solar system as well. Because Mars is the only other rocky planet aside from Earth, that has moons. But its moons are, uh, obviously very different to our own gigantic, very influential moon that we have here on Earth.

10:03Stuart Gary Yeah, we got our moon thanks to the giant

10:05 impact we did. Mars, on the other hand, is the only place in the universe that we know of, other than Earth, where there's a real likelihood, a real potential for life to have existed. It was once warm and wet, and as it cooled, it lost its protective shielding, its atmosphere. And, uh, the water that was there slowly evaporated and degassed into space.

10:26 Any life now would be fossilised, and there are tantalising signs of that in places like Chiava Falls.

10:31Silvia Mantovanini I think it is, it is exceptionally exciting.

10:34 As you said, Mars has launched a very different planet, very similar to Earth in a lot of ways. And if life did exist there, those fossils should remain in the fossil record. And so I think that's one of the biggest questions we have just in general as humans, as beings is are we alone in the universe? Is life only on the Earth, or are we going to find it elsewhere. And the first place to really dig into that is our own solar system. We've got some tantalising candidates.

10:58 We know that we've got moons around Jupiter and Saturn that likely have big subsurface oceans that could have life in them, but they're very far away. They're less tangible to us to physically think about going and collecting samples analysed. Where is Mars? Mars is right there. Yes, it's far away, but it's fairly close to the Earth. We can get there within a year or two. We can collect a sample and bring it back in less than a decade. But it is that kind of holy grail of can we answer this question with one simple sample?

11:24Stuart Gary And it's easier to launch off because it's so

11:26 much smaller.

11:27Silvia Mantovanini That's right. Gravity is, um, relentless.

11:30 Unfortunately, in the universe all things fall at the whim of gravity. And so if you have a smaller mass, a smaller planet or a small moon, how wonderful you are able to get that exit velocity. You need to get on your merry way. Whereas launching, launching things from, uh, Earth is very doable. We've done it for decades now. But it is extraordinarily expensive to fight against that force of gravity and get things into orbit and away from the Earth as we need to.

11:53Stuart Gary China are likely to undertake their sample

11:55 return mission to Mars and, um, return those samples possibly by 2029. That's, that's very exciting. The American European mission, which was the final stage of what the Mars perseverance robe is doing on Jezero Crater. Now that's sort of up in the air at the moment. No, uh, pun intended because of federal funding, but nevertheless, it's got the samples, they're lying there on the surface to be collected. We just have to go back there and get them. It's a very interesting stage in research right now. It must be really frustrating as a, as a scientist involved in this type of research, to see one of your goals so near and yet out of reach so far.

12:35Silvia Mantovanini I think it is a very, uh,

12:37 unique time in history where we know so much and so little and we know what we need to do to be able to advance technologies. And yet we're constantly blocked by same challenges by, by different challenges that, that are, uh, global at this point. But certainly when we're looking to the United States that there's been a large halt on what we thought the direction of science is going to be in the next 10, 20 years. And so as a scientist worldwide, look, we've got this collective worry of we know what we need to do for advancing human knowledges not just in astronomy or space exploration, but in medicine and things that are really going to change our life. And yet we're halted by funding.

13:14 And I think this is a universal problem and something that here in Australia a lot of scientists have been quite vocal about with our Academy of Science trying to advocate to all of the MPs around our country how vital scientific research is for our everyday life and how it should be funded significantly because we only know that good consequences will come when we, when we put in that money.

13:34Stuart Gary Yeah, the loss of funding for the European

13:36 Southern Observatory project we were involved in, that's a, uh, that is such a low. That is devastating.

13:42Silvia Mantovanini It is devastating. And Australia has this

13:45 phenomenal history, especially in astronomy where we fat way above our weight in terms of the global scale. And with the European Southern Observatory, it was not only for the astrophysics and the observations of it all, it was actually for the instrumentation as well, which Australia is a world leader at. And so the community right now and is speaking from, coming from that, that astronomical community is trying to figure out what is, what is next for us, where can we maybe have different access to different telescopes to help support the goals to keep Australia on top and all those trickle down technologies that come from it, all the instrumentation that ends up going into other sectors or those algorithms and

14:22 those skills for people that we train that end up going into other sectors, all within the Australian economy. So it is a, it's a very um, an interesting challenge and one that we were keen to solve.

14:34Stuart Gary I keep thinking of the ligo, uh, experience

14:37 that we had a few years ago where LIGO offered Australia a gravitational wave detector. It was there, it was waiting, the plans were there and the Australian government said no. So it went to India and India still haven't built it unfortunately.

14:52Silvia Mantovanini Yes, it is, it is Google. I think what's so

14:54 challenging is in a funding uh, limited environment where you've got more people fighting to do good work and all work in the scientific community across Australia is good and worthy work and it's very difficult. You can't, it's very, very difficult to say this is more deserving of this or this or that.

15:10 And it is an extremely difficult landscape. And I think one way to solve that is to have a landscape that has more funding with bigger dedicated visions. So specific funding for specific goals that is able uh, to help serve those communities.

15:24Stuart Gary That's uh, Dr. Sarah Webb from Swinburne

15:26 University. Um, and this is space time still to come. The Time Lords demand a change in how we understand time itself. And later in the Science report, a, ah, world first Australian developed personalised MRNA melanoma, um, vaccine. All that and more still to come on space time.

15:53Silvia Mantovanini Foreign,

16:02Stuart Gary Uh, following a decision

16:05 to abolish the leap second leap seconds are added or deducted every few years in order to keep the world's atomic clocks aligned with the actual rotation of our planet, so that seasons start where they're supposed to, computers perform as they should, and satellite navigation systems work correctly. The world's clocks are governed by their seconds, 60 of them in every minute, 3,600 in every hour, and 86,400 in a standard mean solar day. By the way, a standard mean solar day is the time it takes the Earth to complete one full rotation, placing any given spot with the sun at zenith, that is directly overhead, directly back at zenith, one full planetary rotation later. That's very different to a sidereal day, which is

16:49 used by astronomers and observatories to track the Earth's rotation, as referenced by a bunch of fixed, seemingly unmoving, um, background stars. The sidereal day shows that the Earth's day is actually just a little bit shorter. 23 hours, 56 minutes and 4 seconds. That's 86164.09 seconds of mean solar time. That difference happens because as the Earth spins on its axis, it's also moving along its orbital path around the sun. So to bring the sun back to the exact same overhead position, the Earth needs to rotate not 360 degrees, but actually 361 degrees. That takes an extra four minutes. Hence the time difference. Measuring the exact time on Earth nowadays is achieved by a global system of atomic clocks, collectively

17:36 known as Coordinated Universal Time, or UTC Zulu. If you're in the military, it's the gold standard. It never changes for daylight saving or for regional differences. So 1200 UTC in London is the same as 1200 UTC in Sydney or in Tokyo or Washington, or even aboard the International Space Station. Originally, every town and village kept its own local time. Basically, 12 noon was when the sun was directly overhead in your local village. But the arrival of the railways in the 1800s forced countries to introduce standard time zones so trains wouldn't crash into each other. And with the arrival of standard time zones across the globe, navigation became easier and businesses flowed more smoothly. It was a

18:20 great idea. But with the arrival of the computer age in spaceflight, accuracy has become of prime importance. You see, precision counts. The Earth's rotation tends to wobble and gradually slow down. It's due to tidal friction and geological events like earthquakes. It makes the planet's rotation an unreliable standard for modern science, navigation and Internet systems.

18:43 So as clocks needed to become more and more accurate, scientists moved away from traditional mechanical and electrical devices and began relying ever more on advanced atomic clocks. In 1967, the governing body of the International Bureau of Weights and Measures, which standardises the ward's measurements, adopted a more precise definition of second based on the measurements of cesium atoms. And this is what underpins coordinated universal time.

19:09 Atomic clocks use cesium fountains to track time with extreme accuracy. Cesium gas is cooled down to near absolute zero and then pushed up as a fountain through a microwave filled cavity. The microwaves are adjusted until they match the exact natural resonance frequency of the cesium atoms, allowing the clock to count the fixed number of cycles that define a second. This method is so exact that cesium clocks neither gain nor lose a single second in, in tens of millions of years. And this level of precision has allowed the second to be measured by counting 9,192,631,770 oscillations or radiation cycles of a Cesium 133 atom during its unperturbed ground state. Hyper defined transition. But the precision of atomic

19:59 clocks have their own problems because they pick up changes in the variability of the Earth's rate of rotation. And that's where leap seconds come in. Since their introduction in 1972, leap seconds have been added to our clocks on 27 occasions, most recently at the end of New Year's Eve 2016. The additional leap seconds keep atomic clocks accurate, navigation systems precise, moving transport smoothly, or at least trying to, and coordinating everything from big business transactions to the automated docking of spacecraft in orbit. Even when the power output needs to be increased during ad breaks and televised football games. These changes, by adding leap seconds, compensates for the known variabilities in the rotational

20:41 speed of, uh, the planet's axis. Without them, time would slowly drift away out of coordination and into ever increasing confusion. But the real need for leap seconds came when scientists determined that the Earth's axial rotation rate simply wasn't consistent enough. See, the Earth's axial rotation changes due to things like mass redistribution and torque forces acting on the planet. While we think of the Earth as a rigid cue ball, it's actually a very dynamic, slightly squashed sphere with a molten core, fluid oceans, a, uh, shifting atmosphere and moving tectonic plates.

21:16 Any event that shifts mass closer or further from the Earth's rotational axis changes the planet's axial spin. That's due to the conservation of angular momentum, much like a spinning figure skater pulls their arms in to spin faster. Overall, there's a long term slowdown of the planet's spin rate over centuries and millennia. That's caused by gravitational tidal friction with the Moon and to a lesser extent, the Sun. See, the Moon's gravity pulls on the Earth's oceans, creating tidal bulges. And because Earth rotates faster than the Moon orbits it, the Earth tries to drag its watery bulge ahead of the Moon. This causes the Moon's gravity to act like a sort of brake, pulling back on this bulge, steadily draining the Earth's

21:57 rotational energy, which causes the Earth's day to lengthen by 2.3 milliseconds every century. And it doesn't end there. There are other factors influencing the Earth's axial spin as well, including the climate. And the last ice age, which physically covered the planet in a thick heavy sheet of ice, altering the shape of the Earth. Post glacial rebound following the melting of those billions of tons of ice cover has slowly seen the distribution of mass shift relative to the planet's centre of gravity.

22:24 During the last ice age, heavy glaciers flattened the, uh, Earth's poles. Now that most of that ice has melted, the land at the poles is slowly bouncing back upwards, making the planet more spherical. And this is shifting mass closer to the axis, speeding up the planet's rotation. There are also modern changes, such as the rapid melting of glaciers in Greenland and Antarctica, which is dumping water back into the oceans, redistributing mass towards the equator, again acting like that figure skater extending their arms to slow down rotation.

22:55 The Earth's spin also changes dynamically from day to day and season to season because of the weather. With wind patterns and strong global wind systems like jet streams pushing hard against the Earth's, uh, surface topography like mountain ranges. When strong winds blow in the direction of the Earth's rotation, the atmosphere gains angular momentum, causing the solid Earth to slow down slightly to compensate. This causes seasonal variations of up to a millisecond per day. And internal planetary mechanics also play an important role. Forces deep within the planet and sudden tectonic movements such as earthquakes cause unpredictable changes deep inside the Earth.

23:32 A, uh, primary cause is the drag along the core mantle boundary layer. The Earth's molten iron outer core sloshes around independently of the base of the rocky mantle layer above it. Changes in magnetic fields and fluid currents at the core mantle boundary can also cause the crust to speed up or slow down. Over decades. And then there are mega earthquakes like, uh, the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami or the 2011 Japanese earthquake, which instantly shift billions of tons of mass, enough to permanently speed up rotation, shortening the day by about 1.8 microseconds. And all these events are making timekeeping in the space age increasingly less and less accurate. And so in 1972, scientists introduced the leap

24:14 second, a, uh, one second adjustment added to coordinated universal time to keep highly precise atomic clocks synchronised to the Earth's natural, natural irregular rotation. Because the planet's rotation fluctuates and gradually slows down over long periods, a discrepancy slowly builds between astronomical time and atomic time.

24:33 When the gap approaches 0.9 seconds, a leap second is inserted, making the final minute of that day 61 seconds long, counted as 23, 59 and 60 seconds, usually on New Year's Eve. But while leap seconds keep clocks aligned with space, they're an operational nightmare for modern day digital infrastructure, causing systems to regularly crash and giving computer programme software writers still recovering from the Y2K bug connections. And the next big leap second insertion will be a negative event, removing a second from the clock. The need for a negative leap second is due to changes in the Earth's core, which has actually caused the planet to temporarily speed up. And this raised fears that scientists would have to

25:15 implement a negative leap second, a 59 second minute. And that's going to send software engineers into uncontrollable nervous breakdowns. Few will survive without their teddy bears. Now, global tech companies have warned that software infrastructure is entirely untested for deleting a second. That's created a massive risk of severe, widespread digital breakdowns. Again, think Y2K.

25:38 So to eliminate these risks, delegates from 69 countries at the International Bureau of Weights and Measures meeting back in 2022 voted to remove leap seconds by 2035 and start discussing a different method of keeping the Earth's days intact. Sync with the astronomical world. But the urgent need to introduce a negative leap second has forced the group to vote again last week, this time to bring the abolishment of the leap second forward to 20 May 2027. Under the new rules, rather than micromanaging a one second gap, the allowed drift between atomic time and the Earth's rotation will be expanded to a full hour. Clocks will continuously run without interruption. Over centuries, our time will slowly drift out of alignment with the

26:21 sun. And eventually, like in thousands of years from now, future generations will simply implement a single leap hour, treating it much like a predictable daylight savings time shift. This is space time.

26:43Silvia Mantovanini Foreign.

26:50Stuart Gary Take a brief look at some of the other

26:52 stories making news in Science this week with a Science report. Scientists have announced a major breakthrough in skin cancer treatment with a world first Australian developed personalised M mRNA melanoma vaccine. Clinical trials of over 1100 patients showed that adding intysmarin to the standard post surgery treatment reduced the risk of melanoma returning within two years by at least 42%. 82% of people in the trial's vaccine group were still living without a recurrence of their cancer after two years, compared to 70% on the standard keytruda treatment alone. The trial is continuing in order to track longer term outcomes. A new study has shown a catastrophic collapse of environment and marine life in the wake of

27:36 the 2010 BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill. The findings, reported in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, found that populations of deep water fishes, crustaceans and squid declined significantly over the past 16 years since the BP ecological disaster first unfolded. The study included over 2,000 net samples, acoustic surveys and genetic analyses. It revealed declines in 64% of fish numbers, 62% of large crustaceans and 60% in small squid and other cephalopods.

28:10 And some of the most ecologically important animals were hit even harder. Krill declined by 83%, lantern fishes by 63% and Bristol mouth fishes by 69%. These concentrations are essential for whales, dolphins, tuna, sharks, seabirds and other marine life. Aquatic life that was common back in 2011 has now virtually disappeared. BP's Deepwater Horizon oil spill released between 4 and 4.9 million barrels of oil, while approximately 770,000 gallons of chemical dispersant were injected nearly the wellhead.

28:43 All related compounds have since been detected in deep water fish eggs and encephalopod tissues. It's an environmental disaster on an unprecedented scale. Breakdown plastics such as polyurethane in chew foam, uh, kitchen sponges and mattresses can be a problem for recycling now. Scientists have improved an enzyme normally produced by bacteria found in compost to enable it to more efficiently break down polyurethane main products. Researchers edited the DNA of the bacteria to produce a more efficient version of a plastic eating enzyme. They tested the enzyme on pieces of soles of shoes, and after three days it had chewed up about 1.4% of the polyurethane, splitting the waste product into smaller,

29:26 reusable pieces. A report in the journal ChemCatalyst claims that although their research is still in its early stages, it does show Promise for future plastic reprocessing. A new study has found that people who spend more time with their pet cats tend to have more positive moods. The findings reported in the journal Eye Science are based on a trial involving 29 cats and their human companions. The authors conducted hormonal analysis through urine samples, attached small Bluetooth low energy beacons to the cat's collars to measure their physical daily proximity, assess the owner's mood through questionnaires and observe the cat's behaviour towards their owners and towards unfamiliar people. The findings revealed

30:08 a hormonal connection between cats and their humans involving oxytocin and cortisol, hormones that are associated with social relationships and stress. They showed a uh, positive correlation in concentrations of oxytocin for both the cats and their people, with higher oxytocin levels in cats linked to lower cortisol levels and fewer negative feelings in their owners. Ultimately, the authors observed that positive mood states in the owners were not connected to how long they've had their cats, but rather to the overall physical proximity between owners and their pets. In other words, owners positive feelings seem to be most strongly associated with how much time they spend with their cats in everyday life. A

30:48 new documentary has been released exposing the famous Patterson Gimlin Bigfoot film as a fake. The iconic shaky 59 second silent 16 millimetre clip shows what appears to be an enormous female Sasquatch walking along a trail at Bluff Creek, California. Sceptics have long claimed it's just some dude in a gorilla costume. And in 2002 Philip Morris, who runs a North Carolina based company offering costumes, props and stage products, claimed that he made the gorilla costume that was used in the film, but had been reluctant to expose the hoax earlier for fear of harming his business.

31:22 Meanwhile, a few years earlier in 1999, longtime Patterson and Gimlin friend Bob Harronius admitted that he was the figure wearing the costume in the film. He says he had not gone public earlier because he was afraid of being convicted of fraud for his part in the hoax, but agreed to finally go public following legal advice. The sceptics Tim Mendham says the new film Capturing Bigfoot which exposes the hoax has just been released on cable.

31:46Tim Mendham The footage is probably one of the most

31:47 famous film videos of a cryptid, an unknown creature, especially a legendary one. And this is the one taken in 67 in a place called Bluff Creek in California by two. I don't know exactly what they were actually adventurous documentary makers who knows happened to have a 16 mil camera them and they filmed a Bigfoot, a Sasquatch, a tall creature, hairy creature, walking along near a creek, sort of a stony tree background.

32:10 It walks along, it looks at them sort of strolling, it's not exactly running anywhere, and then walks on and disappears. And the film runs for about almost a minute and became sort of proof for a lot of people that Bigfoot exists. Now, people have always been investigating it. You get Hollywood makeup people trying to see if the costume is real.

32:28 There is a costume and the suggestion always has been, is that the fake footage, it's quite reasonable. It's probably one of the clearest bits of footage of such a creature. And it goes for a long time. So it's not a fleeting thing disappearing behind a tree. But since then, a filmmaker has made this documentary. Uh, recently this appeared Mark Evans called Capturing Bigfoot.

32:46 And it contains a 40 second clip from a year earlier from 1966, of Bigfoot walking being filmed in much the same way, which they're saying is a trial run for the later 1966 famous clip. They've also spoken with a gentleman who said he was actually inside the costume. It's a lot older now, and that he's playing what happened to how it was set up. And a son or a grandson or something like that of the one of the Patterson or Gimlin, one of the two guys who made the film, witnessing their relative burning the costume in the backyard. So it's a, uh, it was always a controversial film. It was quite a nice film to look at. It probably convinced a lot of people there's been a lot of problems with it. Everything from how the

33:25 animal moves, the shape of the animal. Does it have breasts? Does it not have breasts? Male, female, etc. The way it sort of just saunters across the landscape, gives a look to the researchers, very unlike most Sasquatch stories you've ever heard and trying to get a better grip on it. So this film contains probably evidence which is as definitive as the original Patterson Gimlin film. So you think, uh, all right, okay, which one is real? So now there's some firmer quotes evident in quotes that the original film is not true. Not that anyone who seriously investigates cryptids really does think it's true. But I'm sure there are people who still do. Charlie Z People involved. Patterson. Patterson died not long

34:01 after in 72. It's interesting that this new evidence has cropped up pretty much saying we have the silver bullet that proves that the original film was not true. What a shame, really. It'd be nice if it was true.

34:11Stuart Gary I mean we all want Bigfoot to be real, but.

34:14Tim Mendham Yeah, but you gotta have the evidence.

34:16Stuart Gary You need a corpse or the DNA evidence

34:19 at least that's never.

34:20Tim Mendham But they're also saying, of course they're

34:21 also think you need about 100.

34:23Stuart Gary Well you need big feet, several hundred

34:25 Bigfoots. It's not big. In order to have a viable breeding population.

34:29Tim Mendham Yeah, yeah, that's right. And that's a lot of

34:31 uh, Bigfoot

34:32Stuart Gary not to be recorded by people who have cameras

34:35 on their cell phones.

34:35Tim Mendham That's exactly right. Everyone carries a

34:37 camera now. You don't need a 16 mil camera. Everyone's got a camera in their pocket and it's pretty good quality. But no one has really come up with definitive film. It's amazing how often people see Bigfoot and uh, some of them for a lengthy period of time but forget to film it. And there's no. Every Bigfoot that you most see these days is fuzzy. Perhaps Bigfoot fuzzy.

34:54Stuart Gary Squatch blobs. They're called Squatch blobs.

34:57Tim Mendham And um, I don't know, it's, it's a

34:59 fascinating area for as much for its um, the psychology of belief as it is for any actual evidence of a humanoid. People want to believe. People do. And yeah, that's okay. People want to believe. That doesn't mean it's true.

35:12Stuart Gary That's the sceptics. Timms Mendham. And this

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