Bigfoot Part I

 

Bigfoot (/ˈbɪɡfʊt/), also commonly referred to as Sasquatch (/ˈsæskwætʃ, ˈsæskwɒtʃ/), is a large, hairy mythical creature said to inhabit forests in North America, particularly in the Pacific Northwest. Bigfoot is featured in both American and Canadian folklore, and since the mid-20th century has grown into a cultural icon, permeating popular culture and becoming the subject of its own distinct subculture.

Enthusiasts of Bigfoot, such as those within the pseudoscience of cryptozoology, have offered various forms of dubious evidence to prove Bigfoot's existence, including anecdotal claims of sightings as well as alleged photographs, video and audio recordings, hair samples, and casts of large footprints. However, the scientific consensus is that Bigfoot, and alleged evidence, is a combination of folklore, misidentification, and hoax rather than a living animal.

Folklorists trace the phenomenon of Bigfoot to a combination of factors and sources, including the European wild man figure, folk tales, and indigenous cultures. Examples of similar folk tales of wild, hair-covered humanoids exist throughout the world, such as the Skunk ape of the southeastern United States, the Almas, Yeren, and Yeti in Asia, the Australian Yowie, and creatures in the mythologies of indigenous people. Wishful thinking, a cultural increase in environmental concerns, and overall societal awareness of the subject has been cited as additional factors.

Description

Bigfoot is often described as a large, muscular, and bipedal human or ape-like creature covered in black, dark brown, or dark reddish hair. Anecdotal descriptions estimate a height of roughly 6–9 feet (1.8–2.7 m), with some descriptions having the creatures standing as tall as 10–15 feet (3.0–4.6 m). Some alleged observations describe Bigfoot as more human than ape, particularly in regard to the face. In 1971, multiple people in The Dalles, Oregon, filed a police report describing an "overgrown ape", and one of the men claimed to have sighted the creature in the scope of his rifle but could not bring himself to shoot it because "it looked more human than animal".

Common descriptions include broad shoulders, no visible neck, and long arms, which many skeptics attribute to misidentification of a bear standing upright. Some alleged nighttime sightings have stated the creature's eyes "glowed" yellow or red. However, eyeshine is not present in humans or any other known great apes, and so proposed explanations for observable eyeshine off of the ground in the forest include owls, raccoons, or opossums perched in foliage.

Michael Rugg, the owner of the Bigfoot Discovery Museum, claims to have smelled Bigfoot, stating, "Imagine a skunk that had rolled around in dead animals and had hung around the garbage pits."

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.

History

Folklore and early records

Ecologist Robert Pyle argues 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 like "wild man" or "hairy man", although other names described common actions that it was said to perform, such as eating clams or shaking trees. European folklore traditionally had many instances of the "wild man of the woods," or "wild people," often described as "a naked creature covered in hair, with only the face, feet and hands (and in some cases the knees, elbows, or breasts) remaining bare" These European wild people ranged from human hermits, to human-like monsters. Upon migrating to North America, myths of the "wild people" persisted; with documented sightings of "wild people" reported in what is now New York State and Pennsylvania. In a 2007 paper titled "Images of the Wildman Inside and Outside Europe" it stated:

"To be sure, the modern Sasquatch is largely the product of a European-derived culture, as possibly to an even greater extent is the Australian yahoo; accordingly, traces of the European wildman are discernible in both figures. Yet the sasquatch is partly rooted in Amerindian representations of hairy hominoids, even though the relationship between these, which are often described as small, and the giant sasquatch of the popular Canadian and American imagination is hardly straightforward" — Gregory Forth

Many of the indigenous cultures across the North American continent include tales of mysterious hair-covered creatures living in forests, and according to anthropologist David Daegling, these legends existed long before contemporary reports of the creature described as Bigfoot. These stories differed in their details regionally and between families in the same community and are particularly prevalent in the Pacific Northwest. Chief Mischelle of the Nlaka'pamux at Lytton, British Columbia, told such a story to Charles Hill-Tout in 1898.

On the Tule River Indian Reservation, petroglyphs created by a tribe of Yokuts at a site called Painted Rock are alleged by Kathy Moskowitz Strain, author of the 2008 book Giants, Cannibals, Monsters: Bigfoot in Native Culture, to depict a group of Bigfoots called "the Family". The largest glyph is called "Hairy Man", and they are estimated to be 1,000 years old. According to the Tulare County Board of Education in 1975, "Big Foot, the Hairy Man, was a creature that was like a great big giant with long, shaggy hair. His long shaggy hair made him look like a big animal. He was good in a way, because he ate the animals that might harm people", and Yokuts parents warned their children not to venture near the river at night or they may encounter the creature.

16th-century Spanish explorers and Mexican settlers told tales of the los Vigilantes Oscuros, or "Dark Watchers", large creatures alleged to stalk their camps at night. In the region that is now Mississippi, a Jesuit priest was living with the Natchez in 1721 and reported stories of hairy creatures in the forest known to scream loudly and steal livestock.

In 1929, Indian agent and teacher J.W. Burns, who lived and worked with the Sts'ailes Nation (then called the Chehalis First Nation), published a collection of stories titled, Introducing B.C.'s Hairy Giants: A collection of strange tales about British Columbia's wild men as told by those who say they have seen them, in Maclean's magazine. The stories offered various anecdotal reports of wild people; including an encounter a tribal member had with a hairy wild woman who could speak the language of the Douglas First Nation. Burns coined the term "Sasquatch", believed to be the anglicized version of sasq'ets (sas-kets), roughly translating to "hairy man" in the Halq'emeylem language. Burns describes the Sasquatch as, "a tribe of hairy people whom they claim have always lived in the mountains – in tunnels and caves".

The folklore of the Cherokee includes tales of the Tsul 'Kalu, who were described as "slant-eyed giants" that resided in the Appalachian Mountains, and is sometimes associated with Bigfoot.

Members of the Lummi tell tales about creatures known as Ts'emekwes. The stories are similar to each other in the general descriptions of Ts'emekwes, but details differed among various family accounts concerning the creature's diet and activities. Some regional versions tell of more threatening creatures: the stiyaha or kwi-kwiyai was a nocturnal race, and children were warned against saying the names so that the "monsters" would not come and carry them off to be killed. The Iroquois tell of an aggressive, hair covered giant with rock-hard skin known as the Ot ne yar heh or "Stone Giant", more commonly referred to as the Genoskwa. In 1847, Paul Kane reported stories by the natives about skoocooms, a race of cannibalistic wild men living on the peak of Mount St. Helens. U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt, in his 1893 book, The Wilderness Hunter, writes of a story he was told by an elderly mountain man named Bauman in which a foul-smelling, bipedal creature ransacked his beaver trapping camp, stalked him, and later became hostile when it fatally broke his companion's neck. Roosevelt notes that Bauman appeared fearful while telling the story but attributed the trapper's German ancestry to have potentially influenced him.

The Alutiiq of the Kenai Peninsula in Alaska tell of the Nantinaq, a Bigfoot-like creature. This folklore was featured in the Discovery+ television series, Alaskan Killer Bigfoot, which claims the Nantinaq was responsible for the population decrease of Portlock in the 1940s.

Less menacing versions have been recorded, such as one by Reverend Elkanah Walker in 1840. Walker was a Protestant missionary who 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.

Ape Canyon incident

On July 16, 1924, an article in The Oregonian made national news when a story was published describing a conflict between a group of gold prospectors and a group of "ape-men" in a gorge near Mount St. Helens. The prospectors reported encountering "gorilla men" near their remote cabin. One of the men, Fred Beck, indicated that he shot one of the creatures with a rifle. That night, they reported coming under attack by the creatures, which were said to have thrown large rocks at the cabin, damaging the roof and knocking Beck unconscious. The men fled the area the following morning. The U.S. Forest Service investigated the site of the alleged incident. The investigators 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.

Origin of the "Bigfoot" name

Jerry Crew and Andrew Genzoli

In 1958, Jerry Crew, bulldozer operator for a logging company in Humboldt County, California, discovered a set of large, 16 inches (410 mm) human-like footprints sunk deep within the mud in the Six Rivers National Forest. Upon informing 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 (200 kg) having been moved without explanation. The logging company men soon began using the word "Bigfoot" to describe the apparent culprit. Crew and others initially believed someone was playing a prank on them. After observing more of these massive footprints, he contacted reporter Andrew Genzoli of the Humboldt Times newspaper. Genzoli interviewed lumber workers and wrote articles about the mysterious footprints, introducing the name "Bigfoot" in relation to the tracks and the local tales of large, hairy wild men. A plaster cast was made of the footprints and Crew appeared, holding one of the casts, on the front page of the newspaper on October 6, 1958. The story spread rapidly as Genzoli began to receive correspondence from major media outlets including the New York Times and Los Angeles Times. As a result, the term Bigfoot became widespread as a reference to an apparently large, unknown creature leaving massive footprints in Northern California.

Ray Wallace and Rant Mullens

In 2002, the family of Jerry Crew's deceased coworker Ray Wallace revealed a collection of large, carved wooden feet stored in his basement. They stated that Wallace had been secretly making the footprints and was responsible for the tracks discovered by Crew.

Wallace was inspired by another hoaxer, Rant Mullens, who revealed information about his hoaxes in 1982. In the 1930s in Toledo, Washington, Mullens and a group of other foresters carved pairs of large feet made of wood and used them to create footprints in the mud to scare huckleberry pickers in the Gifford Pinchot National Forest. The group would also claim to be responsible for hoaxing the alleged Ape Canyon incident in 1924. Mullens and the group of foresters began referring to themselves as the St. Helens Apes, and would later have a cave dedicated to them.

Wallace, also from Toledo, knew Mullens and stated he collaborated with him to obtain a pair of the large wooden feet and subsequently used them to create footprints on the 1958 construction site as a means to scare away potential thieves.

Other historical uses of "Bigfoot"

In the 1830s, a Wyandot chief was nicknamed "Big Foot" due to his significant size, strength and large feet. Potawatomi Chief Maumksuck, known as Chief "Big Foot", is today synonymous with the area of Walworth County, Wisconsin, and has a state park and school named for him. William A. A. Wallace, a famous 19th century Texas Ranger, was nicknamed "Bigfoot" due to his large feet and today has a town named for him: Bigfoot, Texas. Lakota leader Spotted Elk was also called "Chief Big Foot". In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, at least two enormous marauding grizzly bears were widely noted in the press and each nicknamed "Bigfoot." The first grizzly bear called "Bigfoot" was reportedly killed near Fresno, California, in 1895 after killing sheep for 15 years; his weight was estimated at 2,000 pounds (900 kg). The second one was active in Idaho in the 1890s and 1900s between the Snake and Salmon Rivers, and supernatural powers were attributed to it.

Regional and other names

Many regions throughout North America have differentiating names for Bigfoot. In Canada, the name Sasquatch is widely used in addition to Bigfoot. The United States uses both of these names but also has numerous names and descriptions of the creatures depending on the region and area in which they are allegedly sighted. These include the Skunk ape in Florida and other southern states, Grassman in Ohio, Fouke Monster in Arkansas, Wood Booger in Virginia, the Monster of Whitehall in Whitehall, New York, Momo in Missouri, Honey Island Swamp Monster in Louisiana, Dewey Lake Monster in Michigan, Mogollon Monster in Arizona, the Big Muddy Monster in southern Illinois, and The Old Men of the Mountain in West Virginia. The term Wood Ape is also used by some as a means to deviate from the perceived mythical connotation surrounding the name "Bigfoot". Other names include Bushman, Treeman, and Wildman.

Patterson-Gimlin film

On October 20, 1967, Bigfoot enthusiast Roger Patterson and his partner Robert "Bob" Gimlin were filming a Bigfoot docudrama in an area called Bluff Creek in Northern California. The pair claimed they came upon a Bigfoot and filmed the encounter. The 59.5-second-long video, dubbed the Patterson-Gimlin film (PGF), has become iconic in popular culture and Bigfoot-related history and lore. The PGF continues to be a highly scrutinized, analyzed, and debated subject.

Academic experts from related fields have typically judged the film as providing no supportive data of any scientific value, with perhaps the most common proposed explanation being that it was a hoax.

Proposed explanations

Various explanations have been suggested for sightings and to offer conjecture on what existing animal has been misidentified in supposed sightings of Bigfoot. Scientists typically attribute sightings to hoaxes or misidentifications of known animals and their tracks, particularly black bears.

Misidentification

Bears

Scientists theorize that mistaken identification of American black bears as Bigfoot are a likely explanation for most reported sightings, particularly when observers view a subject from afar, are in dense foliage, or there are poor lighting conditions. Additionally, black bears have been observed and recorded walking upright, often as the result of an injury.[96] While upright, adult black bears stand roughly 5–7 feet (1.5–2.1 m), and grizzly bears roughly 8–9 feet (2.4–2.7 m).

According to data scientist Floe Foxon, more people report seeing Bigfoot in areas with documented black bear populations. Foxon concludes, "If Bigfoot is there, it may be many bears". Foxon acknowledges that alleged Bigfoot sightings have been reported in areas with minimal or no known black bear populations. She states, "Although this may be interpreted as evidence for the existence of an unknown hominid in North America, it is also explained by misidentification of other animals (including humans), among other possibilities".

Escaped apes

Some have proposed that sightings of Bigfoot may simply be people observing and misidentifying known great apes such as chimpanzees, gorillas, and orangutans that have escaped from captivity such as zoos, circuses, and exotic pets belonging to private owners. This explanation is often proposed in relation to the Skunk ape, as some scientists argue the humid subtropical climate of the southeastern United States could potentially support a population of escaped apes.

Humans

Humans have been mistaken for Bigfoot, with some incidents leading to injuries. In 2013, a 21-year-old man in Oklahoma was arrested after he told law enforcement he accidentally shot his friend in the back while their group was allegedly hunting for Bigfoot. In 2017, a shamanist wearing clothing made of animal furs was vacationing in a North Carolina forest when local reports of alleged Bigfoot sightings flooded in. The Greenville Police Department issued a public notice not to shoot Bigfoot for fear of mistakenly injuring or killing someone in a fur suit. In 2018, a person was shot at multiple times by a hunter near Helena, Montana, who claimed he mistook him for a Bigfoot.

Additionally, some have attributed feral humans or hermits living in the wilderness as being another explanation for alleged Bigfoot sightings. One story, the Wild Man of the Navidad, tells of a wild ape-man who roamed the wilderness of eastern Texas in the mid-19th century, stealing food and goods from residents. A search party allegedly captured an escaped African slave attributed to the story. During the 1980s, several psychologically damaged American Vietnam veterans were stated by the state of Washington's veterans' affairs director, Randy Fisher, to have been living in remote wooded areas of the state.

Pareidolia

Some have proposed that pareidolia may explain Bigfoot sightings, specifically the tendency to observe human-like faces and figures within the natural environment. Photos and videos of poor quality alleged to depict Bigfoots are often attributed to this phenomenon and commonly referred to as "Blobsquatch".

Misidentified vocalizations

The majority of mainstream scientists maintain that the source of the sounds often attributed to Bigfoot are either hoaxes, anthropomorphization, or likely misidentified and produced by known animals such as owl, wolf, coyote, and fox.

Hoaxes

Both Bigfoot believers and non-believers agree that many reported sightings are hoaxes.

Gigantopithecus

Bigfoot proponents Grover Krantz and Geoffrey H. Bourne both believed that Bigfoot could be a relict population of the extinct Southeast Asian ape species Gigantopithecus blacki. According to Bourne, G. blacki may have followed the many other species of animals that migrated across the Bering land bridge to the Americas. To date, no Gigantopithecus fossils have been found in the Americas. In Asia, the only recovered fossils have been of mandibles and teeth, leaving uncertainty about G. blacki's locomotion. Krantz has argued that G. blacki could have been bipedal, based on his extrapolation from the shape of its mandible. However, the relevant part of the mandible is not present in any fossils. The consensus view is that G. blacki was quadrupedal, as its enormous mass would have made it difficult for it to adopt a bipedal gait.

Anthropologist Matt Cartmill criticizes 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."

Extinct hominidae

Primatologist John R. Napier and anthropologist Gordon Strasenburg have suggested a species of Paranthropus as a possible candidate for Bigfoot's identity, such as Paranthropus robustus, with its gorilla-like crested skull and bipedal gait —despite the fact that fossils of Paranthropus are found only in Africa.

Michael Rugg of the Bigfoot Discovery Museum presented a comparison between human, Gigantopithecus, and Meganthropus skulls (reconstructions made by Grover Krantz) in episodes 131 and 132 of the Bigfoot Discovery Museum Show. Bigfoot enthusiasts that think Bigfoot may be the "missing link" between apes and humans have promoted the idea that Bigfoot is a descendant of Gigantopithecus blacki, but that ape diverged from orangutans around 12 million years ago and is not related to humans.

Some suggest Neanderthal, Homo erectus, or Homo heidelbergensis to be the creature, but, like all other great apes, no remains of any of those species have been found in the Americas.

Scientific view

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. In a 1996 USA Today article, Washington State zoologist John Crane said, "There is no such thing as Bigfoot. No data other than material that's clearly been fabricated has ever been presented." The author of one review article states that, in their opinion, it is impossible even to consider cryptozoology a science if it continues to consider Bigfoot seriously.

As with other similar beings, climate and food supply issues would make such a creature's survival in reported habitats unlikely. 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. Great apes have not been found in the fossil record in the Americas, and no Bigfoot remains are known to have been found. Phillips Stevens, a cultural anthropologist at the University at Buffalo, summarized the scientific consensus as follows:

It defies all logic that there is a population of these things sufficient to keep them going. What it takes to maintain any species, especially a long-lived species, is having a breeding population. That requires a substantial number, spread out over a fairly wide area where they can find sufficient food and shelter to keep hidden from all the investigators.

In the 1970s, when Bigfoot "experts" were frequently given high-profile media coverage, McLeod writes that the scientific community generally avoided lending credence to such fringe theories by refusing even to debate them.

Primatologist Jane Goodall was asked for her personal opinion of Bigfoot in a 2002 interview on National Public Radio's "Science Friday". Goodall responded saying, "Well; now you will be amazed when I tell you that I'm sure that they exist." She later added, "Well, I'm a romantic, so I always wanted them to exist," and "Of course, the big, the big criticism of all this is, "Where is the body?" You know, why isn't there a body? I can't answer that, and maybe they don't exist, but I want them to." In 2012, when asked again by the Huffington Post, Goodall said "I'm fascinated and would actually love them to exist," adding, "Of course, it's strange that there has never been a single authentic hide or hair of the Bigfoot, but I've read all the accounts."

Paleontologist and author Darren Naish states in a 2016 article for Scientific American that if "Bigfoot" existed, an abundance of evidence would also exist that cannot be found anywhere today, making the existence of such a creature exceedingly unlikely.

Naish summarizes the evidence for "Bigfoot" that would exist if the creature itself existed:

If "Bigfoot" existed, so would consistent reports of uniform vocalizations throughout North America as can be identified for any existing large animal in the region, rather than the scattered and widely varied "Bigfoot" sounds haphazardly reported;

If "Bigfoot" existed, so would many tracks that would be easy for experts to find, just as they easily find tracks for other rare megafauna in North America, rather than a complete lack of such tracks alongside "tracks" that experts agree are fraudulent;

Finally, if "Bigfoot" existed, an abundance of "Bigfoot" DNA would already have been found, again as it has been found for similar animals, instead of the current state of affairs, where there is no confirmed DNA for such a creature whatsoever.

Researchers

Ivan T. Sanderson and Bernard Heuvelmans, founders of the study of cryptozoology, spent parts of their career searching for Bigfoot. Later scientists who researched the topic included Jason Jarvis, Carleton S. Coon, George Allen Agogino and William Charles Osman Hill, though they later stopped their research due to lack of evidence for the alleged creature.

John Napier asserts that the scientific community's attitude towards Bigfoot stems primarily from insufficient evidence. Other scientists who have shown varying degrees of interest in the creature are Grover Krantz, Jeffrey Meldrum, John Bindernagel, David J. Daegling, George Schaller, Russell Mittermeier, Daris Swindler, Esteban Sarmiento, and Mireya Mayor.

Formal studies

One study was conducted by John Napier and published in his book Bigfoot: The Yeti and Sasquatch in Myth and Reality in 1973. Napier wrote that if a conclusion is to be reached based on scant extant "'hard' evidence," science must declare "Bigfoot does not exist." However, he found it difficult to entirely reject thousands of alleged tracks, "scattered over 125,000 square miles" (325,000 km2) or to dismiss all "the many hundreds" of eyewitness accounts. Napier concluded, "I am convinced that Sasquatch exists, but whether it is all it is cracked up to be is another matter altogether. There must be something in north-west America that needs explaining, and that something leaves man-like footprints."

In 1974, the National Wildlife Federation funded a field study seeking Bigfoot evidence. No formal federation members were involved and the study made no notable discoveries. Also in 1974, the now defunct North American Wildlife Research Team constructed a "Bigfoot trap" in the Rogue River–Siskiyou National Forest. It was baited with animal carcasses and captured multiple bears, but no Bigfoot. Upkeep of the trap ended in the early 1980s, but in 2006 the United States Forest Service repaired the trap, which today is a tourist destination along the Collings Mountain hiking trail.

Beginning in the late 1970s, physical anthropologist Grover Krantz published several articles and four book-length treatments of Bigfoot. However, his work was found to contain multiple scientific failings including falling for hoaxes.

A study published in the Journal of Biogeography in 2009 by J.D. Lozier et al. used ecological niche modeling on reported sightings of Bigfoot, using their locations to infer preferred ecological parameters. They found a very close match with the ecological parameters of the American black bear. They also note that an upright bear looks much like a Bigfoot's purported appearance and consider it highly improbable that two species should have very similar ecological preferences, concluding that Bigfoot sightings are likely misidentified sightings of black bears.

In the first systematic genetic analysis of 30 hair samples that were suspected to be from Bigfoot-like creatures, only one was found to be primate in origin, and that was identified as human. A joint study by the University of Oxford and Lausanne's Cantonal Museum of Zoology and published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B in 2014, the team used a previously published cleaning method to remove all surface contamination and the ribosomal mitochondrial DNA 12S fragment of the sample. The sample was sequenced and then compared to GenBank to identify the species origin. The samples submitted were from different parts of the world, including the United States, Russia, the Himalayas, and Sumatra. Other than one sample of human origin, all but two are from common animals. Black and brown bears accounted for most of the samples, other animals include cow, horse, dog/wolf/coyote, sheep, goat, deer, raccoon, porcupine, and tapir. The last two samples were thought to match a fossilized genetic sample of a 40,000 year old polar bear of the Pleistocene epoch; a second test identified these hairs as being from a rare type of brown bear.

In 2019, the FBI declassified an analysis it conducted on alleged Bigfoot hairs in 1976. Bigfoot researcher Peter Byrne sent the FBI 15 hairs attached to a small skin fragment and asked if the bureau could assist him in identifying it. Jay Cochran Jr., assistant director of the FBI's Scientific and Technical Services division responded in 1977 that the hairs were of deer family origin.

Claims

Claims about the origins and characteristics of Bigfoot vary. Thomas Sewid, a Bigfoot researcher and member of the Kwakwakaʼwakw tribe claims, "They're just the other tribe. They're just big, hairy humans with nocturnal vision that choose not to have weapons or fire or permanent shelters".

The subject of Bigfoot has also crossed over with other paranormal claims, including that Bigfoot, extraterrestrials, and UFOs are related or that Bigfoot are psychic, can shapeshift, are able to cross into different dimensions, or are completely supernatural in origin. Additionally, claims regarding Bigfoot have been associated with conspiracy theories including a government cover-up.

There have also been claims that Bigfoot is responsible for the disappearances of people in the wilderness, such as the 1969 disappearance of Dennis Martin in Great Smoky Mountains National Park.

Additionally, there have been claims that Bigfoot has been responsible for vehicle accidents, vandalizing property, delaying construction, and killing people. In 2022, a man from Oklahoma claimed he killed his friend because he believed he had summoned Bigfoot and was going to be sacrificed to the creature.