A large and hairy human-like mythical creature is said to inhabit forests in North America, particularly in the Pacific Northwest. This creature is commonly known as "bigfoot" or "sasquatch." Often described as a large, muscular, and bipedal ape or human-like creature covered in black, dark brown, or dark reddish hair, bigfoot supposedly stands roughly 9 feet tall. The enormous footprints for which the creature is named are claimed to be as large as 24 inches (610 mm) long and 8 inches (200 mm) wide. Some footprint casts have also contained claw marks, making it likely that they came from known animals, such as bears, which have five toes and claws.
The belief in this creature isn't just a modern phenomenon. Many of the indigenous cultures across the North American continent include tales of mysterious hair-covered creatures living in forests. To the right are the petroglyphs at the Tule River Indian Reservation site called Painted Rock, depicting the 8.5-foot tall "Hairy Man" and his family. There are also 16th-century reports by Spanish Explorers and Mexican Settlers about the "Dark Watchers," which were large creatures known to stalk camps at night. Another interesting report is from the 18th-century Jesuit priest who reported stories of hairy creatures in the forest known to scream loudly and steal livestock.
I think it's interesting how some ecologists state that most cultures have accounts of human-like giants in their folk history, expressing a need for "some larger-than-life creature". Each language had its name for the creature featured in the local version of such legends. Many names mean something along the lines of "wild man" or "hairy man", although other names described common actions that it was said to perform, such as eating clams or shaking trees.
There are also some less threatening versions of the bigfoot legend. For example, the Sts'ailes people tell stories about sasq'ets, a shape-shifting creature that protects the forest. There is also one by Reverend Elkanah Walker, a Protestant missionary, in 1840. He recorded stories of giants among the natives living near Spokane, Washington. These giants were said to live on and around the peaks of the nearby mountains, stealing salmon from the fishermen's nets.
In 1924 there was a news story that made it all the way to national coverage. This was the story of the Ape Canyon Incident. This story describes a conflict between a group of gold prospectors and a group of "ape-men" in a gorge near Mount St. Helens. The U.S. Forest Service investigated the sight of the alleged incident and found no compelling evidence of the event and concluded it was likely a fabrication. Stories of large, hair-covered bipedal ape-men or "mountain devils" had been a persistent piece of folklore in the area for centuries prior to the alleged incident. Today, the area is known as Ape Canyon and is cemented within Bigfoot-related folklore.
In 1985 a bulldozer for a logging company in Humbolt County, California, called Jerry Crew, discovered a set of 16-inch human-like footprints sunk deep within the mud in the Six Rivers National Forest. Upon telling his coworkers, many claimed to have seen similar tracks on previous job sites as well as telling of odd incidents such as an oil drum weighing 450 pounds having been moved without explanation. Initially, the coworkers believed that someone was playing a prank on them. After a story Andrew Genzoli of the Humboldt Times newspaper wrote, the term Bigfoot became widespread as a reference to an apparently large, unknown creature leaving massive footprints in Northern California. As a result, Willow Creek and Humboldt County are considered by some to be the "Bigfoot Capital of the World. However, in 2002, Crew's coworker Ray Wallace's family revealed a collection of large, carved wooden feet stored in his basement, saying that Wallace had been secretly making the footprints and was responsible for the tracks discovered by Crew.
Bigfoot is usually regarded as a cryptid or a myth, so let's delve into some of the more plausible solutions. Bears, escaped apes, humans, and pareidolia are the most common identifications. However, most people agree that bigfoot is a hoax. Grover Krantz and Geoffrey H. Bourne both believed that Bigfoot could be a relict population of the otherwise extinct southeast Asian ape species Gigantopithecus blacki (jaw bone to the left).
Anthropologist Matt Cartmill is known for his criticisms of the G. Blacki 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." Paleoanthropologist Bernard G. Campbell writes: "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."
I do want to talk about the idea of pareidolia a little bit more just because I think it's cool. Pareidolia is the tendency to perceive a specific, often meaningful, image in a random or ambiguous visual pattern. It is similar to the term apophenia, which is the tendency to perceive a connection or meaningful pattern between unrelated or random things (such as objects or ideas). Apophenia is pareidolia but includes visual, auditory, or a data set, whereas pareidolia focuses only on visual stimulation.
(The picture to the left is a common example of pareidolia! Do you see a monster's eye? or a sink drain?)
Pareidolia is really common in religious circumstances; If someone sees an image of Jesus Christ on their toast, that is pareidolia, but if they then go on to believe that it is God’s way of giving them a message, then that is apophenia again.
Expert consensus is that allegations of the existence of Bigfoot are not credible. Belief in the existence of such a large, ape-like creature is more often attributed to hoaxes, confusion, or delusion rather than to sightings of a genuine creature.
According to Live Science, there have been over 10,000 reported Bigfoot sightings in the continental United States, with reports from every state except the island of Hawaii. Sightings predominantly occur in the northwestern region of Washington State, Oregon, Northern California, and British Columbia. According to data collected from the Bigfoot Field Researchers Organization's (BFRO) Bigfoot sightings database in 2019, Washington has over 2,000 reported sightings, California over 1,600, Pennsylvania over 1,300, New York and Oregon over 1,000, and Texas has just over 800. The debate over the legitimacy of Bigfoot sightings reached a peak in the 1970s, and Bigfoot has been regarded as the first widely popularized example of pseudoscience in American culture.
Bigfoot has a demonstrable impact on popular culture and has been compared to Michael Jordan as a cultural icon. According to a poll taken in May 2020, about 1 in 10 American adults believe that Bigfoot is a real animal. Laws and ordinances exist regarding harming or killing a Bigfoot, specifically in the state of Washington. In 1969 in Skamania County, a law was passed making killing a Bigfoot punishable by a felony conviction resulting in a monetary fine of up to $10,000 or five years imprisonment.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bigfoot
https://owlcation.com/stem/Pareidolia-Explained
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