Bigfoot, also known as
Sasquatch,
is an alleged
ape-like creature purportedly
inhabiting forests, mainly in the
Pacific Northwest region of
North America. Bigfoot is usually described as
a large, hairy,
bipedal humanoid.
The scientific community considers Bigfoot to be a combination of
folklore, misidentification, and
hoaxes, rather than a real creature. In general,
mainstream scientific consensus does not support the posited
existence of
megafauna cryptids such as Bigfoot, because of the improbably
large numbers necessary to maintain a breeding population and
because climate and food supply issues would make such purported
creatures' survival in reported habitats unlikely. Despite these
facts, Bigfoot is one of the more famous examples of a cryptid
within
cryptozoology.
Description
Bigfoot is described in reports as a large ape-like creature,
ranging between tall, weighing in excess of , and covered in dark
brown or dark reddish hair. Alleged witnesses have described large
eyes, a pronounced
brow ridge,
and a large, low-set forehead; the top of the head has been
described as rounded and crested, similar to the
sagittal crest of the male
gorilla. Bigfoot is commonly reported to have a
strong, unpleasant smell by those who have claimed to have
encountered it. The enormous footprints for which it is named have
been as large as long and wide. While most casts have five
toes—like all known apes—some casts of alleged Bigfoot tracks have
had numbers ranging from two to six. Some have also contained claw
marks, making it likely that a portion came from known animals such
as bears, which have five toes and claws. Proponents have also
claimed that Bigfoot is
omnivorous and
mainly
nocturnal.
History
Before 1958
Wildmen stories are found among the
indigenous
population of the Pacific Northwest. The legends existed prior
to a single name for the creature. They differed in their details
both regionally and between families in the same community. Similar
stories of wildmen are found on every continent except Antarctica.
Ecologist Robert Michael Pyle argues that most cultures have
human-like giants in their folk history: "We have this need for
some larger-than-life creature."
Members of the
Lummi tell tales about
Ts'emekwes, the local version of Bigfoot. The stories are
similar to each other in terms of the general descriptions of
Ts'emekwes, but details about the creature's diet and
activities differed between the stories of different
families.
Some regional versions contained more nefarious creatures. The
stiyaha or
kwi-kwiyai were a nocturnal race that
children were told not to say the names of lest the monsters hear
and come to carry off a person—sometimes to be killed.
In 1847, Paul Kane
reported stories by the native people about skoocooms: a
race of cannibalistic wild men living on the peak of Mount St.
Helens
. The
skoocooms appear to have been
regarded as supernatural, rather than natural.
Less menacing versions such as the one recorded by Reverend Elkanah
Walker exist.
In 1840, Walker, a Protestant missionary,
recorded stories of giants among the Native Americans living in
Spokane,
Washington
. The Indians claimed that these giants lived
on and around the peaks of nearby mountains and stole salmon from
the fishermen's nets.
The local legends were combined together by J. W. Burns in a series
of Canadian newspaper articles in the 1920s. Each language had its
own name for the local version. Many names meant something along
the lines of "wild man" or "hairy man" although other names
described common actions it was said to perform (e.g. eating
clams). Burns coined the term Sasquatch, which is from the
Halkomelem sásq’ets ( ), and
used it in his articles to describe a hypothetical single type of
creature reflected in these various stories. Burns's articles
popularized both the legend and its new name, making it well known
in western Canada before it gained popularity in the United
States.
After 1958
In 1951, Eric Shipton had photographed what he described as a Yeti
footprint. This photograph generated considerable attention and the
story of the Yeti entered into popular consciousness.
The notoriety of
ape-men grew over the decade, culminating in 1958 when large
footprints were found in Del Norte County, California
by bulldozer operator Gerald Crew. Sets of
large tracks appeared multiple times around a road-construction
site in Bluff Creek. After not being taken seriously about what he
was seeing, Crew brought in his friend, Bob Titmus, to cast the
prints in plaster. The story was published in the
Humboldt Times along with a photo of
Crew holding one of the casts. Locals had been calling the unseen
track-maker "Big Foot" since the late summer, which Genzoli
shortened to "Bigfoot" in his article. Bigfoot gained international
attention when the story was picked up by the
Associated Press. Following the death of
Ray Wallace, a local logger, his
family attributed the creation of the footprints to him. The wife
of Scoop Beal, the editor of the
Humboldt Standard, which
later combined with the
Humboldt Times, in which Genzoli's
story had appeared, has stated that her husband was in on the hoax
with Wallace.
The year 1958 was a watershed not just for the Bigfoot story itself
but also for the culture that surrounds it. The first Bigfoot
hunters began following the discovery of footprints at Bluff Creek.
Within a year, Tom Slick, who had funded searches for Yeti in the
Himalayas earlier in the decade, organized searches for Bigfoot in
the area around Bluff Creek.
Distribution of reported Bigfoot
sightings in North America.
As Bigfoot has become better known and a
phenomenon in popular culture,
sightings have spread throughout North America. In addition to the
Pacific Northwest, the
Great Lakes region and
the
Southeastern United
States have had many reports of Bigfoot sightings.
Prominent reported sightings
About a third of all Bigfoot sightings are concentrated in the
Pacific Northwest, with most of the remaining sightings spread
throughout the rest of North America.
Some
Bigfoot advocates, such as cryptozoologist
John Willison Green, have postulated
that Bigfoot is a worldwide phenomenon. The most notable sightings
include:
- 1924: Fred Beck claimed that
he and four other miners were attacked one night in July 1924, by
several "apemen" throwing rocks at their cabin in an area later
called Ape
Canyon
. Beck claimed the miners shot and possibly
killed at least one of the creatures, precipitating an attack on
their cabin, during which the creatures bombarded the cabin with
rocks and tried to break-in. The incident was widely reported at
the time. Beck wrote a book about the event in 1967, in which he
argued that the alleged creatures were mystical beings from another
dimension, claiming that he had experienced psychic premonitions
and visions his entire life of which the apemen were only one
component. Speleologist William
Halliday argued in 1983 that the story arose from an incident in
which hikers from a nearby camp had thrown rocks into the canyon.
There are also local rumors that pranksters harassed the men and
planted faked footprints.
- 1941: Jeannie Chapman and
her children claimed to have escaped their home when a large
Sasquatch, allegedly tall, approached their residence in Ruby Creek,
British Columbia
.
- 1958: Bulldozer operator Jerry Crew took to a
newspaper office a cast of one of the enormous footprints he and
other workers had been seeing at an isolated work site at Bluff
Creek, California. The crew was overseen by Wilbur L. Wallace,
brother of Raymond L. Wallace. After Ray Wallace's death, his
children came forward with a pair of wooden feet, which they
claimed their father had used to fake the Bigfoot tracks in 1958.
Wallace is poorly regarded by many Bigfoot proponents. John Napier
wrote, "I do not feel impressed with Mr. Wallace's story" regarding
having over of film showing Bigfoot.
- 1967: Roger Patterson and Robert Gimlin
reported that on October 20 they had captured a purported Sasquatch
on film at Bluff Creek, California. This came to be known as the
Patterson-Gimlin film, which
is purported to be the best evidence of Bigfoot by many advocates.
Many years later, Bob Heironimus, an acquaintance of Patterson's,
claimed that he had worn an ape costume for the making of the
film.
- 2007: On September 16 2007, hunter Rick Jacobs
captured an image of a possible sasquatch using an automatically
triggered camera attached to a tree. A spokesperson for the
Pennsylvania Game
Commission challenged the Bigfoot explanation, saying that it
looked like "a bear with a severe case of mange." The sighting happened
near the town of Ridgway, Pennsylvania
in the Allegheny National Forest
, which is about 115 miles north of Pittsburgh
.
Proposed explanations for sightings
Various types of creatures have been suggested to explain both the
sightings and what type of creature Bigfoot would be if it existed.
The scientific community typically attributes sightings to either
hoaxes or misidentification of known animals and their tracks.
While cryptozoologists generally explain Bigfoot as an unknown ape,
some believers in Bigfoot attribute the phenomenon to
UFOs or other paranormal causes.
A minority of proponents of a natural explanation have attributed
Bigfoot to animals that are not apes such as the
giant ground sloth.
Misidentification
Purported Pennsylvania Bigfoot,
2007
The reported size of Bigfoot approximates that of a
bear standing on its hind legs, and bears have a high
prevalence in regions said to be inhabited by Bigfoot; as such,
they are likely candidates to explain some sightings. A recent
example comes from a series of pictures taken in 2007, claimed by
The Bigfoot
Field Researchers Organization to show a juvenile Bigfoot,
which the
Pennsylvania Game
Commission has said show a bear with
mange. Conversely, some question if the
Pennsylvania Game Commission
have misidentified the image. The broadcast organization
MSNBC feel the hunter’s photo revived the lively
Bigfoot debate. While
Jeffrey
Meldrum said the limb proportions of the suspected juvenile in
question were not bear-like, stating he felt they were "more like a
human."A tale presented in
Theodore
Roosevelt's 1892 book
The Wilderness Hunter,
describing an encounter between two hunters and a violent
something, is sometimes presented by Bigfoot proponents as
historical evidence of the creature's existence.
Hoaxes
Even proponents of Bigfoot admit that many of the sightings are
hoaxes or misidentified animals. Cryptozoologists
Loren Coleman and Diane Stocking have
estimated that as many as 70 to 80 percent of sightings are not
real.
Bigfoot sightings or footprints are often demonstrably hoaxes.
Author Jerome Clark argues that the "Jacko affair", involving an
1884 newspaper report of an apelike creature captured in British
Columbia, was a hoax.
Citing research by John Green, who found that
several contemporary British Columbia newspapers regarded the
alleged capture as very dubious, Clark notes that the New Westminster,
British Columbia
Mainland Guardian wrote, "Absurdity is
written on the face of it."
On July
14, 2005, Tom Biscardi, a long-time
Bigfoot enthusiast and CEO of Searching for Bigfoot Inc.:, appeared
on the Coast to Coast AM
paranormal radio show and announced that he was "98% sure that his
group will be able to capture a Bigfoot which they have been
tracking in the Happy Camp, California
area." A month later, Biscardi announced on
the same radio show that he had access to a captured Bigfoot and
was arranging a
pay-per-view event for
people to see it. Biscardi appeared on Coast to Coast AM again a
few days later to announce that there was no captive Bigfoot.
Biscardi blamed an unnamed woman for misleading him, and the show's
audience for being gullible.
On July 9,
2008, Rick Dyer and Matthew Whitton posted a video to YouTube claiming that they had discovered the body
of a deceased Sasquatch in a forest in northern Georgia
. Tom Biscardi was contacted to investigate.
Dyer and Whitton received $50,000 from Searching for Bigfoot, Inc.,
as a
good faith gesture. The story of the
men's claims was covered by many major news networks, including
BBC,
CNN,
ABC News, and
Fox News.
Soon after a press conference, the alleged Bigfoot body arrived in
a block of ice in a freezer with the Searching for Bigfoot team.
When the contents were thawed, it was discovered that the hair was
not real, the head was hollow, and the feet were rubber. Dyer and
Whitton subsequently admitted it was a hoax after being confronted
by Steve Kulls, executive director of Squatchdetective.com.
Gigantopithecus
Bigfoot proponents
Grover Krantz and
Geoffrey Bourne believe that Bigfoot
could be a relict population of
Gigantopithecus. Bourne contends that
as most
Gigantopithecus fossils are found in China, and as
many species of animals migrated across the
Bering land bridge, it is not unreasonable to
assume that
Gigantopithecus might have as well.
The
Gigantopithecus hypothesis is generally considered
entirely speculative.
Gigantopithecus fossils are not
found in the Americas. As the only recovered fossils are of
mandibles and teeth, there is some
uncertainty about
Gigantopithecus's locomotion. Krantz has
argued, based on his extrapolation of the shape of its mandible,
that
Gigantopithecus
blacki could have been bipedal. However, the relevant part
of mandible is not present in any fossils. The mainstream view is
that
Gigantopithecus was
quadrupedal, and it has been argued that
Gigantopithecus's enormous mass would have made it
difficult for it to adopt a bipedal gait.
Matt Cartmill presents another problem with the
Gigantopithecus hypothesis: "The trouble with this account
is that
Gigantopithecus was not a hominin and maybe not
even a crown-group hominoid; yet the physical evidence implies that
Bigfoot is an upright biped with buttocks and a long, stout,
permanently adducted hallux. These are hominin autapomorphies, not
found in other mammals or other bipeds. It seems unlikely that
Gigantopithecus would have evolved these uniquely hominin
traits in parallel."
Bernard G. Campbellin wrote: "That
Gigantopithecus is in
fact extinct has been questioned by those who believe it survives
as the Yeti of the Himalayas and the Sasquatch of the north-west
American coast. But the evidence for these creatures is not
convincing."
Extinct hominans
A species of
Paranthropus,
such as
Paranthropus
robustus, with its crested skull and bipedal gait, was
suggested by primatologist
John Napier and anthropologist
Gordon Strasenburg as a possible candidate for Bigfoot's identity,
despite the fact that fossils of
Paranthropus are only
found in Africa.
Some Bigfoot proponents suggest
Neanderthal or
Homo
erectus to be the creature, but remains of either species
are also not found in the New World.
View among the scientific community
The scientific community overwhelmingly "discount[s] the existence
of Bigfoot because physical evidence supporting belief in the
survival of a prehistoric, bipedal, ape-like creature of such
dimensions is scant or nonexistent." For example, In a 1996
USA Today article titled "Bigfoot
Merely Amuses Most Scientists", Washington State zoologist John
Crane is quoted as saying: "There is no such thing as Bigfoot. No
data other than material that's clearly been fabricated has ever
been presented." In addition to the lack of evidence, scientists
cite the fact that Bigfoot is alleged to live in regions unusual
for a large, nonhuman primate, i.e., temperate latitudes in the
northern hemisphere; all recognized nonhuman apes are found in the
tropics of Africa and Asia. Thus, as with
other proposed megafauna cryptids, climate and food supply issues
would make such a creature's survival in reported habitats
unlikely. Furthermore, great apes are not found in the fossil
record in the Americas, and no Bigfoot remains have ever been
found. Indeed, scientists insist that the breeding population of
such an animal would be so large that it would account for many
more purported sightings than currently occur, making the existence
of such an animal an almost certain impossibility.
John Napier asserts that the scientific community's attitude
towards Bigfoot stems primarily from insufficient evidence.
Anthropologist David Daegling echoed this idea, citing a
"remarkably limited amount of Sasquatch data that are amenable to
scientific scrutiny." He advises that mainstream skeptics take a
proactive position "to offer an alternative explanation. We have to
explain why we see Bigfoot when there is no such animal."
A few scientists have offered varying degrees of support for
Bigfoot study and beliefs. Field biologist
George Shaller has spoken in favor of greater
study of Bigfoot evidence while still expressing skepticism towards
the possibility of its existence. Similarly, Napier has argued that
some "soft evidence" is compelling enough that he advises against
"dismissing its reality out of hand." Other scientists who have
expressed guarded interest in Sasquatch reports include
Russell Mittermeier,
Daris Swindler, and
Esteban Sarmiento.
Jane Goodall, in a 2002 interview, expressed
her personal hope of the existence of Bigfoot, but allowed that
there is no concrete evidence for the creature. Anthropologist
Carleton S. Coon, whose theories on the evolution of
race in humans have been largely discredited, also expressed
support for Bigfoot's existence in a posthumously published
essay.
See also
- Similar alleged creatures in North America:
- Similar alleged creatures outside of North America:
Footnotes
- Bigfoot hunting
- Sjögren, Bengt, Berömda vidunder, Settern, 1980, ISBN
91-7586-023-6
- Bear signs, San Diego Natural History
Museum.
- Daegling 2004, p.
28
- See for a list of names.
- Bright, William (2004). Native American Place Names of the
United States. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, pg.
422
- Buhs, Joshua Blu, Bigfoot: The Life and Times of a
Legend (Chicago, The University of Chicago Press, 2009), 69,
75
- Buhs, Joshua Blu, Bigfoot: The Life and Times of a
Legend (Chicago, The University of Chicago Press, 2009),
241
- Daegling 2004, p.
35
- "Gorilla Seeahtik Indians and prospectors," Engineering and
Mining Journal-Press, 16 Aug. 1924, p.242.
- Beck, Fred; told to Ronald A. Beck. (1967) I Fought The Apemen of Mount St. Helens,
WA.
- Napier 1973, p.
89
- here.
-
http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5gEmzVz5SwaMaPHdQM26T2ZN4QcGQD8SIE1B00
-
http://www.nationalledger.com/ledgerpop/article_272616948.shtml
- Daegling 2004, p. 20
- MSNBC "Hunter's pics revive lively Bigfoot
debate"
- Young Sasquatch? Earthfiles Podcast
10-31-07
-
http://www.oregonbigfoot.com/georgia_bigfoot_dead_body_in_freezer_dyer_whitton_biscardi.php
- http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/7564635.stm
- http://www.cnn.com/2008/US/08/14/bigfoot.body/
-
http://a.abcnews.com/Technology/story?id=5590180&page=1
-
http://www.foxnews.com/wires/2008Aug16/0,4670,BigfootClaim,00.html
- Daegling 2004, p.
14
- Cartmill 2008, p.
117
- Daegling 2004, p.
16
- .
- Daegling 2004
- Daegling 2004, p.
20
- Napier 1973, p.
197
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