Bigfoot, also called Sasquatch, is a large, hairy, ape-like creature said to walk upright through the forests of North America, especially the Pacific Northwest. It is the most famous cryptid in the world, with thousands of reported sightings, plaster casts of footprints, a celebrated 1967 film and an entire culture of researchers, festivals and roadside attractions. It is also the cryptid that scientists have examined most closely, and so far the evidence has not held up.[1]
| Other names | Sasquatch; many Indigenous names for hairy “wild people” of the forest |
|---|---|
| Region | Forests of North America, especially the Pacific Northwest |
| Typical description | 6–10 ft tall, covered in dark hair, walks upright, very large feet |
| “Sasquatch” popularized | J. W. Burns, Maclean’s, 1929 |
| “Bigfoot” popularized | Humboldt Times, October 1958 |
| Most famous evidence | Patterson–Gimlin film, 20 October 1967 |
| Physical evidence | None confirmed; DNA tests have identified bears, other animals and humans |
Indigenous traditions
Many Indigenous peoples of North America have traditions of giant, hairy or wild people who live in the forests and mountains, such as the Tsonoqua of the Northwest Coast and the “Hairy Man” of the Yokuts in California. Scholars regard these traditions as one important source of the modern legend. They are also part of living cultures, with meanings of their own, and should not be read simply as eyewitness reports of an unknown ape.[1]
How the names began
Sasquatch, 1929
In the 1920s J. W. Burns, a teacher and Indian agent who worked with the Sts’ailes (formerly Chehalis) people of the Fraser Valley in British Columbia, collected stories of hairy giants. In a 1929 article in Maclean’s magazine, he introduced the word “Sasquatch,” thought to come from the Halkomelem word sasq’ets, roughly “hairy man.”[1]
Ape Canyon, 1924
One of the earliest American “Bigfoot” stories comes from Mount St. Helens in Washington. In the summer of 1924, a group of gold prospectors said that ape-like creatures about seven feet tall had bombarded their cabin with rocks at night, after one of the men shot at one of the animals. The story made the newspapers, and the gorge was later named Ape Canyon. Forest Service rangers who investigated found nothing, showed that the large footprints could easily be faked, and concluded that the miners had most likely thrown the rocks themselves.[2]
Bigfoot, 1958
In 1958 Jerry Crew, a bulldozer operator building a logging road at Bluff Creek in Humboldt County, California, found huge human-like footprints around his equipment. He made a plaster cast, and in October 1958 reporter Andrew Genzoli wrote about it in the Humboldt Times, using the name “Bigfoot.” The story was picked up across the country.[1]
In 2002, after the death of Ray Wallace, the contractor Crew worked for, Wallace’s family said that he had made the 1958 tracks with carved wooden feet as a prank.[1]
The Patterson–Gimlin film
On 20 October 1967, at Bluff Creek, Roger Patterson and Bob Gimlin filmed about a minute of 16 mm footage that appears to show a large, dark, hairy figure walking across a clearing and turning to look at the camera, the famous “frame 352.” Patterson had self-published a book about the creatures the year before.[3]
The film has been debated for more than fifty years:[3]
- The speed problem. The camera’s frame rate is unknown. At 24 frames per second the figure moves much like a person; at 16 or 18 it looks less human. Researchers have argued for both.
- Scientists for and against. The anthropologists Grover Krantz and Jeff Meldrum argued that the figure’s gait and proportions are not those of a person in a suit. The primatologist John Napier, who was open to the existence of Sasquatch, nonetheless judged that the film pointed to a hoax. Other researchers concluded that the subject cannot be identified with any confidence.
- Claims of a costume. In 2002 a North Carolina costume maker, Philip Morris, said he had sold Patterson a gorilla suit by mail in 1967. In Greg Long’s 2004 book The Making of Bigfoot, a Washington man named Bob Heironimus said he had worn a suit in the film. Neither claim came with the suit or documents, and their descriptions of the costume differ.
- Special-effects artists have disagreed too, some calling it an obvious suit and others impressed by it.
Most scientists consider the film to have no scientific value on its own: it cannot show what the figure was, and no physical evidence has backed it up in the decades since.[1][3]
What science has found
- Hair and DNA. In 2014 a team from the universities of Oxford and Lausanne analyzed 30 hair samples attributed to Bigfoot, the Yeti and similar creatures. The only primate sample was human; the rest came from known animals, mostly bears.[1][4]
- The FBI test. Documents released in 2019 show that in 1977 the FBI examined hair submitted as Bigfoot hair and identified it as coming from the deer family.[1]
- Bears. A 2009 study in the Journal of Biogeography found that the pattern of Bigfoot sightings closely matches the range of the American black bear, which can stand and walk upright.[1][5]
- No remains. No body, skeleton, tooth or road kill has ever been found, even though Bigfoot country is crossed by roads and visited by millions of hunters and hikers.[1]
- Gigantopithecus. Some writers have suggested a surviving giant ape like Gigantopithecus, known from fossil teeth and jaws in Asia. No Gigantopithecus fossils have been found in the Americas.[1]
The bear connection, tested again
In January 2024 the data scientist Floe Foxon published a study in the Journal of Zoology that put the bear hypothesis to a statistical test. Using thousands of mapped Bigfoot reports and estimates of black bear populations across the United States and Canada, while controlling for human population and forest cover, Foxon found that sightings rose by about 4% for every additional 1,000 black bears in an area. In other words, the more bears there are, the more Bigfoot is reported.[6]
The pattern is not perfect. Florida, for example, has many Bigfoot reports but relatively few black bears, and the biologist Michael Hickerson, a co-author of the 2009 niche-modeling study, pointed out that the bear explanation cannot cover every case. But taken together, the two studies show that the geography of Bigfoot looks very much like the geography of a large, dark, hairy animal that can stand on two legs and already lives in the same forests.[5][6]
The giant ape that really existed
Gigantopithecus blacki is often mentioned as a possible Bigfoot ancestor, and its real story is now much clearer. It was the largest ape ever known, perhaps about 3 meters tall and up to around 300 kg, but it is known only from roughly 2,000 isolated teeth and four lower jaws found in southern China since the first tooth turned up in a Hong Kong pharmacy in 1935. In 2024 an international team led by Yingqi Zhang and Kira Westaway reported in Nature that it went extinct between about 295,000 and 215,000 years ago. As the climate became more seasonal, the fruit it depended on became scarce, and it failed to switch to other foods.[7]
That leaves a gap of hundreds of thousands of years and an ocean between the last Gigantopithecus in China and the first Bigfoot reports in North America. No fossil of any ape, giant or otherwise, has ever been found in the Americas.
Bigfoot in culture
Bigfoot has become an American icon. In 1969 Skamania County, Washington, made it illegal to kill a Bigfoot, and later declared the county a Sasquatch refuge. The Bigfoot Field Researchers Organization keeps a public database of reports, and even many enthusiasts agree that most are mistakes or hoaxes.[1] Films, advertising, festivals and museums keep the legend alive from northern California to British Columbia.
For related creatures, see the Skunk Ape of Florida, the Grassman of Ohio, the Yeti and the Almas.
References
- “Bigfoot,” Wikipedia, citing the Humboldt Times (1958), Maclean’s (1929), the FBI Vault (2019) and scientific literature.
- Douglas Perry, “How a 1924 Bigfoot battle on Mt. St. Helens helped launch a legend,” The Oregonian (26 January 2018); see also “Ape Canyon,” Wikipedia.
- “Patterson–Gimlin film,” Wikipedia; Greg Long, The Making of Bigfoot (Prometheus Books, 2004).
- B. C. Sykes et al., “Genetic analysis of hair samples attributed to yeti, bigfoot and other anomalous primates,” Proceedings of the Royal Society B 281 (2014).
- J. D. Lozier, P. Aniello and M. J. Hickerson, “Predicting the distribution of Sasquatch in western North America: anything goes with ecological niche modelling,” Journal of Biogeography 36 (2009).
- Floe Foxon, “Bigfoot: If it’s there, could it be a bear?” Journal of Zoology (January 2024); reported in Live Science.
- Y. Zhang, K. E. Westaway et al., “The demise of the giant ape Gigantopithecus blacki,” Nature 625 (2024): 535–539; reported by NBC News.
Correction note (October 2026): This entry was rewritten from documented sources and now also covers Sasquatch, which previously had a separate, overlapping page. The illustration above is an artistic impression.