In North American folklore, Bigfoot or Sasquatch are said to be hairy, upright, ape-like creatures that inhabit the wilderness and leave footprints. Depictions often portray them as a missing link between humans and human ancestors or other great apes.
They are strongly associated with the Pacific Northwest (particularly Oregon, Washington, and British Columbia), and individuals claim to see the creatures throughout North America. Over the years, these creatures have inspired numerous commercial ventures and hoaxes. The plural nouns “Bigfoots” and “Bigfeet” are both acceptable.
Folklorists trace the figure of Bigfoot to a combination of factors and sources, including folklore surrounding the European wild man figure, popular belief among Native Americans and loggers, and a cultural rise in environmental concerns.
Most traditional scientists have historically dismissed the existence of Bigfoot, considering it to be a combination of folklore, misidentification, and hoaxes, rather than living animals. A minority, such as anthropologists Grover Krantz and Jeffrey Meldrum, have expressed their belief in the creatures’ existence.
1. Description
People who claim to have seen it describe Bigfoot as a large, muscular, ape-like bipedal creature, approximately 6–9 feet (1.8–2.7 m) tall, covered in hair described as black, dark brown, or dark reddish.
The enormous footprints attributed to the creatures are said to be 24 inches (60 cm) long and 8 inches (20 cm) wide. Some footprint models also contain claw marks, making it likely that they came from known animals, such as bears, which have five toes and claws.
2. History
According to David Daegling, legends predate the name “bigfoot.” They differ in detail both regionally and between families in the same community.
Ecologist Robert Pyle says that most cultures have stories of human-like giants in their folklore, expressing a need for “a larger-than-life creature.” Each language had its own name for the creatures that appear in the local version of such legends.
Many names meant something like “wild man” or “hairy man,” although other names described common actions they were said to perform, such as eating clams or shaking trees.
Chief Mischelle of the Nlaka’pamux in Lytton, British Columbia, told a similar story to Charles Hill-Tout in 1898; he named the creature after a Salishan variant meaning “
Members of the Lummi tell stories about Ts’emekwes, the local version of Bigfoot. The stories are similar in their general descriptions of Ts’emekwes, but details differed between different family accounts about the creatures’ diet and activities.
Some regional versions tell of more threatening creatures. The stiyaha or kwi-kwiyai were a nocturnal race. Children were warned not to say their names, lest the monsters hear and take a person away, sometimes to kill them.
In 1847, Paul Kane reported stories from Indians about skoocooms, a race of cannibalistic wild men living on the summit of Mount St. Helens in southern Washington State.
3. Sightings
Approximately one-third of all Bigfoot sighting claims are in the Pacific Northwest, with the remaining reports spread across the rest of North America.
Bigfoot has become more widely known and is a phenomenon in popular culture, and sightings have spread throughout North America. Rural areas of the Great Lakes region and the southeastern United States have been sources of numerous reports of Bigfoot sightings, in addition to the Pacific Northwest.
In The Bigfoot Case Book, authors Janet and Colin Bord document sightings from 1818 to 1980, listing more than 1,000 sightings. The debate over the legitimacy of Bigfoot sightings reached its peak in the 1970s, and Bigfoot has been considered the first widely popularized example of pseudoscience in American culture, so much so that, according to a 2014 Associated Press poll, more Americans believe in Bigfoot than in the Big Bang theory.
4. Proposed explanations for sightings.
Several explanations have been suggested for the sightings and to offer conjectures about what kind of creature Bigfoot might be. Some scientists tend to attribute the sightings to hoaxes or misidentification of known animals and their tracks, particularly black bears.
5. Misidentification
In 2007, the Bigfoot Field Research Organization presented some photos that they claimed showed a juvenile Bigfoot. The Pennsylvania Game Commission, however, said the photos were of a bear with mange. However, anthropologist Jeffrey Meldrum and scientist Jason Jarvis said the creature’s limb proportions were not like a bear’s, but “more like a chimpanzee’s.”
6. Hoaxes
Both Bigfoot believers and non-believers agree that many of the reported sightings are hoaxes or misidentified animals. Author Jerome Clark argues that the Jacko Affair was a hoax involving an 1884 report of a captured ape-like creature in British Columbia.
He cites research by John Green, who found that several contemporary British Columbia newspapers considered the alleged capture highly dubious, and points out that the New Westminster Guardian of British Columbia wrote: “The absurdity is written on its face.”
Tom Biscardi is a longtime Bigfoot enthusiast and CEO of Searching for Bigfoot Inc. He appeared on the paranormal radio show Coast to Coast AM on July 14, 2005, and said he was “98% sure that his group will be able to capture a Bigfoot they had been tracking in the Happy Camp area of California.”
A month later, he announced on the same radio show that he had access to a captured Bigfoot and was organizing a pay-per-view event for people to see it. He appeared on Coast to Coast AM again a few days later to announce that there was no captive Bigfoot. He blamed an anonymous woman for deceiving him and said the show’s audience was gullible.
In August 2012, a man in Montana was killed by a car while committing a Bigfoot hoax wearing a ghillie suit.
7. Gigantopithecus
Bigfoot advocates Grover Krantz and Geoffrey H. Bourne believed that Bigfoot could be a relict population of Gigantopithecus. All Gigantopithecus fossils have been found in Asia, but according to Bourne, many animal species migrated across the Bering land bridge, and he suggested that Gigantopithecus could have done so as well.
No Gigantopithecus fossils have been found in the Americas. The only fossils recovered are jaws and teeth, leaving uncertainty about Gigantopithecus’s locomotion. Krantz has argued that Gigantopithecus blacki could have been bipedal, based on his extrapolation of the shape of its jaw. However, the relevant part of the jaw is not present in any fossils. An alternative view is that Gigantopithecus was quadrupedal; its enormous mass would have made it difficult for it to adopt a bipedal gait.
8. Extinct hominins
Primatologist John R. Napier and anthropologist Gordon Strasenburg have suggested a species of Paranthropus as a possible candidate for the identity of Bigfoot, such as Paranthropus robustus, with its gorilla-like skull and bipedal gait, despite the fact that Paranthropus fossils are only found in Africa.
Some suggest that Neanderthal, Homo erectus, or Homo heidelbergensis are the creature, but no remains of any of those species have been found in the Americas.
9. Scientific view
In 2013, ZooBank, the non-governmental organization generally accepted by zoologists for assigning species names, approved the application for registration of the species name Homo sapiens cognatus to be used for the hominid reputedly more familiarly known as Bigfoot or Sasquatch.
The request was made by Dr. Melba S. Ketchum, DVM, Moody Scholar and principal scientist of the Sasquatch Genome Project, following the publication of “New North American Hominids, Next-Generation Sequencing of Three Complete Genomes and Associated Studies,” Ketchum, MS, et al, in DeNovo: Journal of Science, February 13, 2013.
However, many other leading scientists do not consider the Bigfoot subject to be a fertile area for credible science, and there have been a limited number of formal scientific studies of Bigfoot.
Evidence such as the 1967 Patterson-Gimlin film has provided “no supporting data of any scientific value.”
10. Bigfoot Organizations
There are several organizations dedicated to the investigation and research of Bigfoot sightings in the United States. The BFRO also provides a free database for individuals and other organizations. Their website includes reports from across North America that have been investigated by researchers to determine credibility.
In February 2016, the University of New Mexico in Gallup held a two-day Bigfoot conference at a cost of $7,000 in university funds.
