You’ve seen them on bumper stickers and postcards, in movies and TV series, video games, roadside attractions, museums, even in advertising for insurance commercials; an immensely tall, shaggy, slightly hunched, ape-like figure commonly known as Bigfoot or sasquatch.
What started off as a handful of local legends, grew to become a cultural phenomenon here in the Pacific Northwest. Many Bigfoot enthusiasts credit the notorious 1967 “Patterson-Gimlin Film,” for kickstarting this collective obsession, as the short documentary allegedly features the first captured footage of Bigfoot. But before they adorned the bumpers of cars or the logos of social distancing awareness campaigns, sasquatches were the subject of stories specifically tied to Indigenous peoples’ oral storytelling history and traditions. These trickled into the stories of parties involved in the western expansion; reports in Ohio and Pennsylvania newspapers of encountering seven-foot tall, wild, hairy men, according to Cliff Barackman, a Bigfoot field researcher, the host of Animal Planet’s “Finding Bigfoot” TV series and owner of the North American Bigfoot Center in Boring, Oregon.
“Many of these stories actually describe behaviors that weren’t even known in apes until Jane Goodall and Dian Fossey did their pioneering studies in the 1960s and 70s,” Barackman said. “But yet, here we are, in like 1843 and you have a giant, hairy man throwing rocks, and that continued to happen, so eventually they slapped some names on them.”
The term “Bigfoot” wasn’t coined until 1958, when a man named Jerry Crew discovered massive 16-inch footprints on a freshly grated road he was building in northern California. The footprints would continue to appear overnight, simultaneously confusing and intriguing him.
“They took some plaster casts and brought it to a taxidermist, who had never seen ([the footprints) before, and eventually brought it to the newspaper in Humboldt County, and that’s where the word ‘Bigfoot’ was born,” Barackman said.
Many documented Bigfoot sightings have occurred at night near dense, wooded areas, much like the terrain of the Pacific Northwest and parts of Canada, where Jeffrey Meldrum, Bigfoot expert and a professor of anatomy and anthropology at Idaho State University, had a potential encounter. On a five-day research trip in Alberta, Canada, Meldrum and his colleagues heard something approach their campsite late at night.
“We’d always stay up quite late in hopes that something might visit the camp,” Meldrum said. “And sure enough, at about two in the morning one night, suddenly we started hearing vocalizations, these whistling chirping calls, and then the sound of heavy steps. Something that sounded like a bull moose was around just outside of the firelight, under the cover of the brush.”
Attempting to observe the animal with a night vision monocular, Meldrum caught a brief glimpse of an exceptionally large silhouette breaking from cover and crossing the road they were camped adjacent to.
“And we had seen footprints previously, 13.5-to-14-inch footprints, and what we saw had to have been at least seven feet tall,” he said.
Through his research, Meldrum devised a technical formula to estimate how many sasquatches can be found in a particular area, based on how many black bears are also documented in the area, as the optimal habitats for both creatures are quite similar. Keeping in mind a variety of other factors play into this, Meldrum’s rule of thumb is for every 200 black bears in a region there is one sasquatch. In Idaho, for example, with a population of about 35,000 black bears, Meldrum estimates there to be approximately 150 to 300 sasquatches in the state.
Many individuals, like Mark Warner, a historical archeologist and University of Idaho professor, aren’t particularly sold on Bigfoot’s existence. While Warner, who considers himself a Bigfoot skeptic, finds the anthropological aspects and mythologies of Bigfoot fascinating, he attributes his research with fossils to be the source of his doubts that such a creature could exist.
“Scholars have been doing a tremendous amount of research on humans and primates
throughout the world, and we’ve found robust evidence of our hominid origins going back millions of years through multiple fossil accounts,” Warner said. “What we really don’t have is conclusive physical evidence of Bigfoot. Where are the skeletal remains of some large, bipedal primate?”
Other individuals, such as Barackman and Meldrum, believe in the existence of Bigfoot so sincerely they’ve conducted and presented extensive research, seeking to destigmatize the subject.
Evidence Meldrum has found to be particularly convincing includes his main study, footprints, as well as scat and hair.
“We have hair that can’t be attributed to common forms of wildlife, but it shows primate characteristics,” he said. “We hear vocalizations that can be analyzed spectrographically that don’t match other forms of wildlife. (There is) a lot of evidence that should compel the scientific community to at least remain open minded about the possibility.”
Barackman also finds the study of sasquatch footprints to be the main, credible source of evidence that they are an existing species. Superficially, sasquatch footprints appear to be overgrown human footprints, but the mechanics behind their foot structure proves otherwise, he explained.
“Like every other ape species and most human ancestors, they’ve retained a tremendous amount of flexibility in the mid part of their foot, whereas human beings don’t, we have an arch like a longitudinal ‘L,’” he said. “The science and the physics behind their foot structure is exactly what would be necessary to carry a mass of their size.”
What appears to unite believers and skeptics alike is the acknowledgement over the last few decades, Bigfoot, or perhaps the idea of them, has generated immense traction among the public.
Warner attributes this to the general imaginative tendencies of humans and the means by which we cope with the unknown.
“We read fiction like crazy, we tell ghost stories,” Warner said. “Believers in some faiths will look at another faith’s origin stories as myths and so on. I think this is part of the creative process, and I think good stories sell.”
Similarly, Meldrum believes the phenomenon is related to humans’ fascination with the mysterious and is intrigued by what Bigfoot has come to symbolize.
“Bigfoot will represent something that’s rare, elusive, hard to find,” he said. “It’s just iconic, all the places it appears, all of the pop art and the culture and the logos. Bigfoot this, Bigfoot that.”
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