Bigfoot

• 1. Introduction

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  Bigfoot, also called Sasquatch, is a giant, hairy, apelike figure said to walk the forests of North America, above all in the Pacific Northwest. More than 10,000 sightings have been reported in the continental United States, and about one-third of them come from that single corner of the continent.

  A poll in 2020 suggested that roughly 1 in 10 American adults believe Bigfoot is a real, living creature. Experts see it differently. They describe the evidence as a blend of folklore, misidentification and hoax, and they do not count the creature as a real animal.

  So why does the belief refuse to fade? Where did the two famous names come from, and who first spoke them? What were people describing long before anyone said either word? And what happens when hoaxers, scientists and devoted believers all study the same footprints?

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• 2. Two Names, Many Owners

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  In 1929, a teacher and Indian agent named J.W. Burns published a set of stories in Maclean's magazine. Burns lived and worked with the Sts'ailes Nation, then called the Chehalis First Nation, and his stories concerned the wild men of British Columbia. He coined the word Sasquatch, believed to be an anglicized form of sasq'ets, which roughly means hairy man in the Halq'emeylem language.

  The other name arrived through mud. In 1958, a bulldozer operator named Jerry Crew found human-like footprints, 16 inches long, pressed deep into the ground in the Six Rivers National Forest in Humboldt County, California. His logging coworkers said they had seen similar tracks at earlier job sites. One told of an oil drum weighing 450 lb that had somehow been moved. The men began calling the culprit Bigfoot.

  Crew first suspected a prank. He contacted a reporter named Andrew Genzoli at the Humboldt Times, whose articles carried the name Bigfoot into print. On the 6th of October 1958, Crew appeared on the front page holding a plaster cast of a track. Letters from major outlets, including the New York Times and Los Angeles Times, soon reached Genzoli.

  The prank theory turned out to be close to the truth. In 2002, the family of Ray Wallace, Crew's late coworker, revealed carved wooden feet stored in his basement. They said Wallace had secretly made the tracks. He had taken his inspiration from a man named Rant Mullens, who confessed to his own hoaxes in 1982.

  Mullens explained that in the 1930s, in Toledo, Washington, he and fellow foresters carved pairs of big wooden feet. They pressed them into the mud of the Gifford Pinchot National Forest to frighten huckleberry pickers. The group called itself the St.Helens Apes, and a cave was later dedicated to them. Wallace, also from Toledo, said he borrowed a pair and used it at a 1958 construction site to scare off thieves.

  The words Big Foot had belonged to others long before. In the 1830s, a Wyandot chief earned the nickname for his size, strength and large feet. Potawatomi Chief Maumksuck, known as Chief Big Foot, gave his name to a state park and a school in Walworth County, Wisconsin. The Texas Ranger William A. A. Wallace got the same nickname, and a town called Bigfoot, Texas, now honors him. The Lakota leader Spotted Elk was also called Chief Big Foot.

  Two enormous grizzly bears were nicknamed Bigfoot as well. One was reportedly killed near Fresno, California, in 1895, after killing sheep for 15 years. His weight was estimated at 2,000 pounds. The second roamed Idaho between the Snake and Salmon rivers around the 1890s and 1900s, and people credited it with supernatural powers.

  Regional names multiplied across the continent. Florida and other southern states have the skunk ape, and Arkansas has the Fouke Monster. Ohio has the Grassman, Missouri has Momo, and Arizona has the Mogollon Monster. Some enthusiasts prefer Wood Ape, a label meant to shed the mythical flavor of the older names.

  Those older traditions lead to a bigger question about what the Sasquatch name was borrowing from.

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• 3. Wild People of the Old Stories

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  On the Tule River Indian Reservation, a site called Painted Rock holds petroglyphs made by a tribe of Yokuts, estimated to be 1,000 years old. The author Kathy Moskowitz Strain, in a 2008 book, says they depict a group of Bigfoots called the Family. The largest figure is named Hairy Man, or Mayak Datat.

  A 1975 account from the Tulare County Board of Education describes Big Foot, the Hairy Man, as a shaggy giant who was "good in a way, because he ate the animals that might harm people". Even so, Yokuts parents warned children not to go near the river at night.

  The anthropologist John A. McClelland points to Tsonoqua, a giant, hair-covered ogre of Pacific Northwest tradition who steals children and food. He considers this the likely origin of the Sasquatch legend. Among the Lummi, the Ts'emekwes appear in family accounts that agree on the broad outline but differ on diet and habits. Fiercer versions, the stiyaha or kwi-kwiyai, were a nocturnal race, and children were told never to speak their names.

  Farther east, the Iroquois tell of the Ot ne yar heh, a hair-covered giant with rock-hard skin, usually called the Genoskwa or Stone Giant. Cherokee tradition describes the Tsul 'Kalu, "slant-eyed giants" living in the Appalachian Mountains. In Alaska, the Alutiiq of the Kenai Peninsula tell of the Nantinaq. A television series has claimed this creature caused Portlock's population to decline in the 1940s.

  European settlers carried their own version. Folklore across Europe pictured a wild man of the woods, naked and covered in hair apart from the face, hands and feet. When such stories crossed the ocean, they persisted, and reports of wild people came from what is now New York state and Pennsylvania. A 2007 paper concluded that the modern sasquatch is largely the product of European-derived culture, though partly rooted in Amerindian images of hairy beings that are often described as small.

  The ecologist Robert Pyle argues that most cultures keep accounts of human-like giants because people want some larger-than-life creature. Many names simply mean wild man or hairy man, while others describe habits such as eating clams or shaking trees.

  Early written records add more. Spanish explorers and Mexican settlers of the 16th century spoke of the Dark Watchers, big shapes said to stalk their camps at night. In 1721, a Jesuit priest living with the Natchez in what is now Mississippi reported stories of hairy forest creatures that screamed and stole livestock. In 1840, the missionary Reverend Elkanah Walker recorded tales of giants near Spokane, Washington, who stole salmon from fishermen's nets.

  Theodore Roosevelt's 1893 book The Wilderness Hunter retells a story from an elderly mountain man named Bauman. A foul-smelling, upright creature ransacked his beaver-trapping camp, stalked him, and then fatally broke his companion's neck. Roosevelt noted that Bauman seemed afraid, though he suspected the trapper's German ancestry had colored the tale.

  In 1847, the painter Paul Kane heard of the skoocooms, a cannibal race of wild men said to live on the peak of Mount St. Helens. That same mountain would later host the best-known frontier clash in Bigfoot lore.

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• 4. Footage, Casts and Confrontations

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  On the 16th of July 1924, The Oregonian ran a story that made national news. Gold prospectors near Mount St. Helens said they had met "gorilla men" near their remote cabin. One of them, Fred Beck, said he shot one of the creatures with a rifle.

  That night, the men reported, the creatures hurled large rocks at the cabin. The rocks damaged the roof and knocked Beck unconscious. The prospectors fled at dawn. The U.S. Forest Service investigated, found no compelling evidence, and concluded the story was probably a fabrication. The spot is now called Ape Canyon.

  On the 20th of October 1967, Roger Patterson and his partner Robert Gimlin were filming a Bigfoot docudrama at Bluff Creek in Northern California. They claimed they came upon a Bigfoot and filmed it. The result, a clip lasting 59.5 seconds, is known as the Patterson-Gimlin film.

  Experts in related fields have typically found no data of scientific value in it, and the most common explanation is hoax. Even so, some enthusiasts mark the 20th of October as National Sasquatch Awareness Day.

  In 1971, a family in Fouke, Arkansas, reported that a big, hairy creature reached through a window and startled a woman. The incident set off hysteria in the area and inspired the 1972 horror film The Legend of Boggy Creek. The report was later judged a hoax.

  In 1974, the New York Times presented the doubtful tale of Albert Ostman, a Canadian prospector. He said a family of Bigfoot had kidnapped him and held him captive for six days in 1924.

  Videotape brought new claims. In 1994, a former Forest Service ranger named Paul Freeman videotaped a creature he said he met in the Blue Mountains of Oregon. People still debate the Freeman footage. On the 26th of May 1996, Lori Pate recorded a dark figure running across a field near the Washington-Canada border. Daniel Perez of the Skeptical Inquirer concluded it was probably a person in a gorilla costume.

  In the year 2000, a body-shaped impression in the mud of Washington's Gifford Pinchot National Forest became known as the Skookum cast. Some believe a Bigfoot sat down to eat fruit that researchers had left out during the filming of an Animal X episode. Skeptics think an elk made it.

  In October 2023, a woman named Shannon Parker posted a Facebook video taken from the Durango and Silverton Narrow Gauge Railroad in Colorado's San Juan Mountains. It went viral. Some skeptics on Reddit suspected an RV company called Sasquatch Expedition Campers of staging a publicity stunt, which the company denied.

  In 2018, the researcher Claudia Ackley sued the California Department of Fish and Wildlife for failing to acknowledge Bigfoot. She said she filmed one in the San Bernardino Mountains in 2017 and called it a "Neanderthal man with a lot of hair". A state investigator decided she had seen a bear. Until her death in 2023, Ackley also ran an online support group for people who said they were traumatized by Bigfoot encounters.

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• 5. The Case for Mistaken Identity

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  In 1971, several people in The Dalles, Oregon, filed a police report about an "overgrown ape". One man said he had the creature in his rifle scope but could not shoot it because "it looked more human than animal". That mix of ape and human runs through the usual descriptions.

  Witnesses describe a tall, upright figure covered in black, dark brown or dark reddish hair, with broad shoulders, no visible neck and long arms. Heights run from roughly 6 to 9 ft, and some accounts reach 10 to 15 ft. Footprints are claimed to reach 24 in long and 8 in wide. Some casts show claw marks, which points toward bears, since bears have five toes and claws.

  Michael Rugg, owner of the Bigfoot Discovery Museum, says he has smelled the creature and likens it to a skunk that rolled around in dead animals. Some night sightings mention eyes glowing yellow or red. Humans and known apes do not show such eyeshine, so proposed explanations include owls, raccoons and opossums in the foliage.

  Scientists name the American black bear as the likely cause of most sightings, especially in dense foliage or poor light. Black bears have been recorded walking upright, often after an injury, and stand roughly 5 to 7 ft tall in that posture. A 2009 study in the Journal of Biogeography, led by J.D. Lozier, modeled the ecology of reported sightings and found a very close match with the American black bear.

  The data scientist Floe Foxon found that more people report Bigfoot in areas with documented black bear populations. His summary was blunt: "If bigfoot is there, it may be many bears".

  People have also been mistaken for the creature, with dangerous results. In 2013, a 21-year-old man in Oklahoma was arrested after he said he accidentally shot his friend in the back while their group hunted for Bigfoot. In 2017, a shamanist in animal furs was vacationing in a North Carolina forest as Bigfoot reports flooded in. The Greenville Police Department asked the public not to shoot Bigfoot, fearing someone in a fur suit might be hurt. In 2018, a hunter near Helena, Montana, shot at a person several times, claiming he took him for a Bigfoot.

  The mind adds its own help. Pareidolia, the habit of seeing faces and figures in nature, may explain blurry photos, which fans call "Blobsquatch". Howls and screams are usually attributed to owls, wolves, coyotes and foxes. Some have suggested escaped zoo, circus or pet apes, especially for the skunk ape in the humid southeast.

  Others point to hermits and feral people. The state of Washington's veterans' affairs director, Randy Fisher, stated in the 1980s that several psychologically damaged Vietnam veterans were living in remote wooded areas of the state.

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• 6. What the Laboratory Found

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  In 1996, Washington State zoologist John Crane told USA Today, "There is no such thing as Bigfoot. No data other than material that's clearly been fabricated has ever been presented." Expert consensus agrees. Apes live only in the tropics of Africa and Asia, great apes have never turned up in the fossil record of the Americas, and no Bigfoot remains are known.

  The cultural anthropologist Phillips Stevens stresses breeding: a long-lived species needs a population large enough to sustain itself while staying hidden from every investigator. The paleontologist Darren Naish, writing in Scientific American in 2016, listed what real Bigfoot would leave behind. There would be consistent vocalizations, easy-to-find tracks and plentiful DNA, and none of those exist.

  Genetics has been tested directly. A joint study by the University of Oxford and Lausanne's Cantonal Museum of Zoology, published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B in 2014, analyzed thirty hair samples suspected to come from Bigfoot-like creatures. They came from the United States, Russia, the Himalayas and Sumatra. Only one was of primate origin, and it was human. Most of the rest were black and brown bears, along with cow, horse, deer, raccoon, porcupine, tapir and others. Two samples first appeared to match a 40,000-year-old polar bear, but a second test showed a rare type of brown bear.

  The FBI contributed in 1977. Researcher Peter Byrne had sent fifteen hairs attached to a skin fragment, and Jay Cochran Jr. replied that they came from the deer family. The analysis was declassified in 2019.

  On the 24th of November 2012, a veterinary lab called DNA Diagnostics, headed by Melba Ketchum, issued a press release before peer review. It claimed Sasquatch was a human relative that arose approximately 15,000 years ago as a hybrid of modern humans and an unknown primate. When no journal accepted the work, Ketchum announced publication in the DeNovo Journal of Science. That journal was a website registered anonymously only nine days before the announcement, and the paper was its only article. The Princeton geneticist Leonid Kruglyak said the analyses either came back as 100 percent human or failed in ways suggesting technical artifacts.

  Footprint evidence has divided experts too. Anthropologist Jeffrey Meldrum holds over 300 footprint casts that he believes no carved feet or human feet could have made. In 2005, Matt Crowley recreated the dermal ridges of the Onion Mountain Cast. The fingerprint expert Jimmy Chilcutt had earlier called some casts genuine, but a critic noted he published nothing to back that claim.

  Some serious attempts were made. In his 1973 book, the primatologist John Napier wrote that thin evidence forced science to declare Bigfoot nonexistent. Still, he could not wave away thousands of tracks scattered over 125,000 square miles. In 1974, a research team built a baited Bigfoot trap in the Rogue River-Siskiyou National Forest. It caught several bears but no Bigfoot, and the Forest Service restored it in 2006. It is now a tourist stop on the Collings Mountain hiking trail.

  Some proponents, including Grover Krantz and Geoffrey H. Bourne, proposed that Bigfoot descends from Gigantopithecus blacki, an extinct Asian ape. No fossils of it have been found in the Americas, and the Asian finds are only jaws and teeth. Anthropologist Matt Cartmill objected that the traits attributed to Bigfoot are uniquely hominin ones that this ape would be unlikely to have evolved on its own.

  Even Jane Goodall, speaking in 2012, said it was strange that there had never been a single authentic hide or hair of the Bigfoot.

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• 7. Hoaxers and Showmen

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  In 1968, the frozen corpse of a supposed hair-covered hominid, about 1.8 m long, toured the United States in a traveling exhibition. Stories of its origin varied, from hunters in Minnesota to American soldiers near Da Nang during the Vietnam War. The primatologist John Napier studied it and judged it a latex hoax, though others said he never examined the original. As of 2013, the Minnesota Iceman was displayed at the Museum of the Weird in Austin, Texas.

  On the 14th of July 2005, Tom Biscardi, CEO of Searching for Bigfoot, Inc., told the radio show Coast to Coast AM that he was 98 percent sure his group would capture a Bigfoot near Happy Camp, California. A month later he announced access to a captured one and planned a pay-per-view event. A few days after that, he returned to say there was no captive. He blamed an unnamed woman and called the audience gullible.

  On the 9th of July 2008, Rick Dyer and Matthew Whitton posted a YouTube video claiming they had found a dead Bigfoot in northern Georgia. Biscardi's company paid them $50,000. Major news networks, including the BBC, CNN, ABC News and Fox News, covered the story. When the body, delivered in a block of ice, thawed, observers found false hair, a hollow head and rubber feet. Dyer and Whitton admitted the fraud when Steve Kulls of SquatchDetective.com confronted them.

  In August 2012, a man in Montana died after being hit by a car while staging a Bigfoot hoax in a ghillie suit.

  In January 2014, Dyer claimed he had killed a Bigfoot outside San Antonio, Texas, in September 2012. He promised DNA tests and 3D scans but never released them. On the 28th of March 2014, he admitted on Facebook that the corpse was a prop made by Chris Russel of Twisted Toybox from latex, foam and camel hair. He had nicknamed it Hank, and the tour earned him approximately US$60,000.

  Online stunts followed. In April 2022, a man in Mobile, Alabama, posted photos he called a Bigfoot and implied the Mobile County Sheriff's Office had validated them. He later said it was an April Fools' Day joke. On the 7th of July 2022, the media personality Coyote Peterson claimed to have excavated a large primate skull in British Columbia. Scientists thought it was likely a replica gorilla skull. Darren Naish said he believed the stunt was clickbait and had "backfired". In a follow-up video, Peterson said the situation was staged as an example of what not to do.

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• 8. Bigfoot Country

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  In 1969, Washington passed a law making the killing of a Bigfoot a felony, punishable by a fine of up to $10,000 or five years in prison. The state amended it in 1984 to a misdemeanor, and the entire county was declared a Sasquatch refuge. Whatcom County followed in 1991 with a Sasquatch Protection and Refuge Area. In 2022, Grays Harbor County passed a similar resolution after an elementary school in Hoquiam submitted a classroom project asking for one.

  The creature became a mascot as well. Squatch served the Seattle SuperSonics from 1993 until 2008, and Douglas Fur still performs for the Portland Trail Blazers. A Bigfoot named Legend was the official mascot of the 2022 World Athletics Championships in Eugene, Oregon. In 2025, the Unicode Consortium announced a Bigfoot emoji called hairy creature.

  Searching has its own vocabulary. People who hunt are called Bigfooters or Squatchers, and the act is called Squatching. The cryptozoologist Loren Coleman dubbed Peter C. Byrne, René Dahinden, John Green and Grover Krantz the Four Horsemen of Sasquatchery.

  Sociologists Jamie Lewis of Cardiff University and Andrew Bartlett of the University of Sheffield interviewed 160 enthusiasts over three years. They found most were middle-aged white men, often former military members in blue-collar jobs. The pair sorted them into Apers, who think Bigfoot is an unknown primate, and Woo-Woos, who think it is supernatural.

  The Bigfoot Field Researchers Organization is the oldest and largest group and keeps a free database of reports. Its 2019 data lists over 2,000 sightings in Washington, over 1,600 in California and over 1,300 in Pennsylvania.

  The pursuit can be deadly. On the 28th of December 2024, two men were found dead in the Gifford Pinchot National Forest after setting out on Christmas day to look for Bigfoot. The Skamania County Sheriff's Office concluded they were likely unprepared for the harsh weather.

  Towns have turned the legend into business. Willow Creek, California, calls itself the Bigfoot Capital of the World and has hosted its Bigfoot Daze festival since the 1960s. The 2023 Bigfoot Festival in Marion, North Carolina, drew about 40,000 people to a town of fewer than 8,000. In 2021, Oklahoma State Representative Justin Humphrey proposed an official Bigfoot hunting season with a $3 million bounty for a live capture. In 2024, the mayor of Derry, Pennsylvania, named Bigfoot the borough's official cryptid.

  The creature also works for conservation. In 2018, the podcaster Laura Krantz argued that Bigfoot is a way to draw people into caring about the environment. The U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service uses Bigfoot as a mascot for its Leave No Trace Principles. In 2026, Oregon's state fire marshal launched a wildfire campaign called Wildfire Prepared: One Foot at a Time.

  At the High Desert Museum in Bend, Oregon, an exhibit called Sensing Sasquatch presents the figure as a protective entity for many Indigenous peoples. During the 2026 Artemis II mission, Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen wore a patch featuring Bigfoot, chosen to represent honesty, one of the Teachings of the Seven Grandfathers.

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