Bigfoot and Sasquatch: The Footprints, the Film and the Evidence

Stories of large, hairy, humanlike beings living in the forests belong to the traditions of many Indigenous nations of the Pacific Northwest, with different names, roles and meanings from one people to another. The word sasquatch comes from sásq'ets in Halkomelem, a Coast Salish language of what is now southwestern British Columbia. It was popularized in English by J. W. Burns, a schoolteacher on a reserve of the Sts'ailes (Chehalis) people, who wrote about the creatures in the late 1920s and 1930s, notably in Maclean's magazine.

Those traditions deserve to be read on their own terms. They are part of living cultures, and their meanings do not reduce to a claim about an undiscovered ape. The modern North American creature, an unknown great ape seven or eight feet tall that walks upright and leaves enormous footprints, took its familiar shape in newspapers in the 1950s and 1960s, and much of its best-known evidence comes from a single creek in the mountains of Northern California.

In late August 1958, a bulldozer operator named Jerry Crew, working on a logging road being cut along Bluff Creek in Northern California, found enormous humanlike footprints, about 16 inches long, in the dirt around his machine. Workers on the job had been calling the unseen track-maker Big Foot. Crew made a plaster cast, and that fall the Humboldt Times in Eureka published a photograph of him holding it. The story, and the name, went national.

Crew worked for a road-building company run by Ray Wallace. After Wallace died in November 2002, his family told reporters the footprints had been a prank: he had asked a friend to carve a pair of oversized wooden feet, they said, and he and his brother had worn them to stamp tracks around the site. They showed the carved feet to the press. Some Bigfoot researchers dispute the claim, arguing that the wooden feet do not match Crew's casts and that one prankster cannot account for decades of later tracks. What the family's statement does establish is that the footprints behind the very name came from a site run by a well-known practical joker, and that convincing tracks are not hard to fake.

On October 20, 1967, two men on horseback, Roger Patterson and Bob Gimlin, were riding along Bluff Creek when, they said, they came upon a large, dark, hair-covered figure walking beside the water. Patterson grabbed a 16mm movie camera and filmed it as it strode away, turning its head and shoulders to glance back at the camera in the frame that became the most famous image in the field. The footage lasts about a minute. The two men also made casts of footprints at the site.

More than half a century later, the film is still the centerpiece of the debate. Supporters, including some anatomists and anthropologists, argue that the figure's gait, proportions and visible muscle movement would have been very hard to fake with a 1967 costume. Skeptics reply that a person in a well-made suit explains everything on screen, that the camera's frame rate is uncertain, so the walking speed and gait cannot be analyzed precisely, and that Patterson had been planning a Bigfoot documentary before he shot it. In a 2004 book by the writer Greg Long, a Yakima man said he had worn the suit, and a costume maker said he had sold Patterson an ape suit; Gimlin has always denied any hoax, and critics have noted inconsistencies between the two accounts. Patterson died in 1972. No one has produced the suit, and no one has shown the figure was an animal.

Physical samples are where Bigfoot has fared worst. In 1976 the FBI laboratory agreed, unusually, to examine about 15 hairs attached to a scrap of skin sent by a Bigfoot research center in Oregon; its files, released in 2019, show the bureau concluded they were of deer origin. In 2014 a team led by the Oxford geneticist Bryan Sykes published the most systematic study so far, sequencing DNA from 30 hair samples from around the world attributed to Bigfoot, the yeti and similar creatures. Every one matched a known animal. Samples attributed to Bigfoot came from bears, raccoons, porcupines, horses, cows, sheep, deer, wolves or dogs, and a human. Two Himalayan samples matched an ancient polar bear, a match that other geneticists soon challenged, arguing that the hairs most likely came from an ordinary Himalayan brown bear.

The larger problem is what is missing. A population of large apes able to survive for generations would need many animals, yet there are no bones, no bodies, no roadkill, no fossil apes anywhere in the Americas and no clear photographs from a continent now full of trail cameras and phones. The closest real candidate, the giant ape Gigantopithecus, lived in what is now southern China, and a 2024 study dated its extinction to between about 295,000 and 215,000 years ago. Skeptics attribute most reports to bears standing upright, misjudged size and distance in poor light, and hoaxes.

Thousands of people across North America have reported seeing Bigfoot, and most of them are not hoaxers. They are hunters, hikers and drivers who saw something large and dark at the edge of a forest and could not place it. Memory and expectation play a large part: a brief, poorly lit glimpse is reconstructed afterward, and an observer who knows the Bigfoot story has a ready-made shape to fit it into. Black bears, which are common across much of the continent and sometimes walk on their hind legs, are the most frequent suspect.

The creature has also become a cultural fixture, with festivals, museums and roadside statues. In 1969 Skamania County, Washington, passed an ordinance making the killing of a Bigfoot a felony punishable by a fine of up to $10,000 and up to five years in jail; it was reduced to a gross misdemeanor in 1984 and is still on the books. For mainstream zoologists the case is not closed by proof of absence, which is impossible, but by the lack of a single specimen after nearly seventy years of searching. One body, or one unambiguous DNA sample, would change everything. Until then, the footprints, the film and the stories are evidence of something, but not of a new ape.