Legend Of Bigfoot
Bigfoot is described to be a bipedal, hairy, humanoid creature that typically lurks in lightly populated areas. These creatures are said to resemble a mix of monkey and man. Although approximately one third of sightings occur in the Pacific Northwest, many societies have reportedly seen similar creatures: in the Himalayas and Russia the Yeti, in Malaysia the Orang Mawas, in South America the Mapinguari, in Australia the Yowie, and in China the Yeren or the “Man-Monkey” just to name a few. In Medieval Europe, the “wild man” was a hairy mythical being depicted in artwork and described in literature. Historians agree it was most likely influenced by the faun or satyr borrowed from the Greco-Roman culture that was flooding into Europe at the time. Throughout history, many societies have left behind signs (which were most likely related to lore, tales, or religion) telling of a similar creature to bigfoot, perhaps the same. Modern sightings of Bigfoot, or Sasquatch, usually take place in North America, mostly in Oregon, Washington, Northern California, Alaska, and the forested areas of Canada. In the Southern US, the “skunk ape” is said to roam in the wetlands, swamps, and the Everglades of Florida. Described to be slightly shorter than its bigfoot cousin in the north, it carries red fur instead of black or brown, and it is said to have a very vile scent following it. Many witnesses say it looked almost exactly like an orangutan. 
These pair of images are the best documented photographs of the “skunk ape.” They arrived at the Sarasota Sheriff’s Department in December 2000, and they show a huge red monkey with red eyes. In case you were wondering, although many skunk ape sightings report red or glowing eyes, the red eyes in these images are a result of the lack of the tapetum lucidum layer in monkeys and humans; it happens all the time in photos. Many experts have come to a consensus and agreed that the creature in the photos was an escaped orangutan. This begs the question: could skunk ape sightings be escaped monkeys? It turns out that Florida has a huge monkey problem. The state actually has a substantial permit system in order to own monkeys. With the right qualifications however, you can legally keep chimpanzees, bonobos, gorillas, gibbons, and orangutans. According to the website animallaw.info, “they are among the most heavily regulated animals in the state. It is generally illegal to keep any species of ape as a pet, and in addition to federal permits, a state permit is required to possess those animals for any commercial purpose like breeding, sale, or exhibition.” In addition, WJXT (a Jacksonville news station) once reported that Rhesus Macaque, which was brought into Florida in 1930, has spread in the wild. Vervet monkeys too; they arrived in the 1950s and 60s which corresponds to when skunk ape sightings became common: in the 1960s and 70s. The Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission even warned residents to stay away from the monkeys because of diseases like types of herpes. Although these monkeys are far smaller than the sightings report, it is plausible that these creatures spurred the sudden accounts of the skunk ape in the 60s and 70s.
The term Bigfoot entered the stage of public discussion in the late 1950s and 60s, when a journalist named Andrew Genzoli published an alleged sighting in the newspaper Humboldt Times. His story called attention to a group of road construction workers in Northern California, among them Jerry Crew, who had found large footprints that were 18 inches long and 7 inches. Crew later plastered the prints, which were found at Bluff Creek, and passed it on as evidence.
Apparently, the idea of a huge man-like creature that still exists captivated the public.
Then on October 20, 1967 Roger Patterson and Robert Gimlin witnessed and took a motion picture of an “undeniable” Bigfoot. Perhaps the most famous Bigfoot evidence, the “Patterson Footage” was captured along Bluff Creek in Northern California, and it depicts a tall bipedal creature with either “silvery-brown,” “dark reddish brown,” or “black fur” slowly lumbering out of sight into the lush forest area. According to the cameraman, Patterson, his horse reared back and threw him off upon seeing the Bigfoot, and then he immediately took out his 16mm movie camera. Running at 16 frames per second, the film initially jumps and blurred badly, disallowing any identification of any sort. As his distance with the creature closes to about 80 feet, the sasquatch rotates its head to look at Patterson. In his book Bigfoot Prints: A scientific Inquiry into the Reality of Sasquatch, Grover Krantz, an anthropologist and cryptozoologist, described how Patterson told him about the bigfoot in the film, “As Patterson told me: ‘it looked at me with such an expression of contempt and disgust, that I just stayed right there.’ The way he put it to John Green was ‘You know how it is when the umpire tells you “one more word and you’re out of the game”; that’s the way it felt.’ ” Near the end of the film, Paterson moves to the left, and now the creature is moving almost directly away from him. The camera suddenly runs out of film. After the creature left, Patterson and Gimlin made casts of the remaining footprints and nine days later taxidermist Robert Titmus did too, and also drew a map marking the paths of Patterson, Gimlin, and the alleged Bigfoot. The authenticity of this film since has become a controversial debate among scientists. The two options are clear: either the film depicts a real undiscovered bigfoot species, or it is a human in a hairy suit. Patterson film advocates often note the appearance of muscles and the smooth body movement as evidence, neither of which would apparently be achieved by a suit or costume of any sort. Critics disagree, however; some, like Cliff Crook and Chris Murphy, claim to have exposed the suit’s zip fastener. In addition to attracting the attention of mainstream scientists, the Patterson-Gimlin footage also caught the eye of TV programs. MonsterQuest is a show that aired on the History channel from 2007-2010 focusing on cryptozoology and was advertised as taking a “scientific” approach to these subjects. In one episode, scientists Jurgen Konczak and Esteban Sarmiento try to see if a mime can impersonate the exact movement of the Patterson creature. The mime couldn’t pull it off. At the end of the show, the show concludes that the evidence they gathered is “intriguing but inconclusive.”
Although Bigfoot sightings usually occur in remote forested areas, the monkey man of New Delhi, otherwise known as Kaala Bandar (which translates to black monkey), is an aggressive black-haired bipedal monkey creature with a metal helmet that was said to roam in New Delhi in 2001. In the month of May ‘01, residents in the capital started reporting a 4 ft (or sometimes 8 ft) monkey/man creature that leapt across rooftops and attacked people by scratching them. These reports caused terror in the highly populated and close quartered areas of the capital. After police became majorly involved, the situation came to an end and the local police tagged it as “mass hysteria.” A similar creature supposedly lives in Northern India too; the Mande Barung inhabits the Meghalaya subtropical forests, although the area is far more remote then busy New Delhi.
In 1976, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) started a file on Bigfoot.
Peter Byrne, the founder and head of The Bigfoot Information Center in Oregon, had dedicated his life to finding bigfoot. In ‘76 he sent 15 samples of unidentified hair pieces to the FBI, hoping they could pinpoint their origin. Jay Cochran Jr., who was the assistant director of the FBI’s scientific and technical services
division at the time, wrote to Byrne on December 15 that same year writing, “The FBI laboratory conducts examinations primarily of physical evidence for law enforcement agencies in connection with criminal investigations. Occasionally, on a case-by-case basis, in the interest of research and scientific inquiry, we make exceptions to this general policy. With this understanding, we will examine the hairs and tissue mentioned in your letter." On the official memorandum dated February 22, 1977, it says, “The hairs were determined to be from a member of the deer family.” And since Byrne was out of the country, Howard S. Curtis from the Academy of Applied Sciences in Boston took the results to hand to Byrne later. On June 5, 2019 the FBI documents were declassified and it caused a lot of interest from the public. If the US government got involved with the phenomenon of Bigfoot, does that mean Bigfoot has some credibility? Byrne, who was 93 and continuing his search for bigfoot, acted surprised when the FBI declassified the documents and claimed the results hadn’t been sent to him Even though the official results debunked the authenticity of the “bigfoot hairs,” it didn’t change his mind. According to KGW, a TV station in Oregon, he said, “"I find that people who doubt or are skeptical are people who know nothing about it. They haven't done any studies or anything like that. There's a wealth of literature going back to 1795." Whether the legend of bigfoot goes back that far is debatable, but records show of ancient societies describing similar creatures. The oldest account of possible bigfoot footprints is in 1811, when David Thompson, a British trader, cartographer, and explorer discovered abnormally large footprints in the snow in what is now Jasper, Alberta. The prints were fourteen inches long by eight inches wide with short claw marks and had a heel imprint. British primatologist John Napier, the same person who concluded the Patterson footage to be fake in his book Bigfoot: The Sasquatch and Yeti in Myth and Reality, said Thompson’s observations were not decisive enough to make a conclusion.
Before sending his hair samples to the FBI, Peter Bryne had already been travelling the world to search for the bigfoot phenomenon. His website says he participated in five Himalayan expeditions searching for Yeti, and three major Pacific Northwest research projects in search of Sasquatch. Beginning after his service for the in World War 2, he spent time in Northern India and eventually went on his first small expedition into the middle Himalaya. After leaving the British Royal Air Force, he went back several times. On one of his expeditions, he saw the famous Yeti scalp in person.
The Yeti scalp is held in a village in Nepal called Khumjung and is supposedly the scalp of a 300 year old Yeti. In 1960, Sir Edmund Hillary borrowed the scalp and took it to London for examination. The results stated that the hairs were extremely similar to the Serow hair sample, and it was perhaps a local variety of the species.
There have been many attempts done by experts and scientists to try and discover a reason of Bigfoot’s existence and why there is no decisive evidence yet. Some note the fact that there are many forests and habitats where there are multiple sightings that are virtually untouched, whether it be because of the massive size, difficult travel terrain, or general unpopularity. For example, the Northern Forest Complex in Myanmar (Burma) holds many subtropical forests that are located on steep inclines in the mountainous regions. According to this paper, several reports of ‘wildmen’ have been made in Northern Myanmar, usually describing a bipedal primate with vocalizations and a strong odor. Witnesses say they are “120-245 cm in height, and covered in longish pale to orange-red hair with a head-neck ruff.”
Some scientists suggest the creatures reported to be “bigfoot” are an extinct species in the family of hominidae. One possibility would be Gigantopithecus blacki, a close relative to the orangutan, only much bigger, and it went extinct around 300,000 years ago. Its remains were only found in China, however, and it would not account for the thousands of ‘Bigfoot’ (or a similar creature) sightings all over the world.
So is Bigfoot real? By the nature of science, it would be difficult for a creature of that size to sustain and shield itself from human society for this long. Most scientists agree that this elusive creature is just a figment of imagination, culture, and legend, and do not consider Bigfoot as an existing animal. Some experts will always disagree. Jane Goodall, an English anthropologist and primatologist who has made groundbreaking discoveries in the field, believes Bigfoot might exist. In an interview with Yahoo entertainment, she noted how every continent in the world has a Bigfoot equivalent. “There’s something, I don’t know what it is... I’m always open minded.” Mainstream media and entertainment has had a part in popularising Bigfoot. Today, there are even shows like Animal Planet’s “Finding Bigfoot,” which aimed at capturing evidence of the creature. Ironically, the show ended two years ago without ever finding Bigfoot.
In the end, unless there is DNA, body, or clear and unblurry film evidence, there is no certain way to authenticate Bigfoot. So for now, it's merely just a legend. The Legend of Bigfoot.
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| Many hunters intend to hunt and kill Bigfoot to prove his existence |
Apparently, the idea of a huge man-like creature that still exists captivated the public.
Then on October 20, 1967 Roger Patterson and Robert Gimlin witnessed and took a motion picture of an “undeniable” Bigfoot. Perhaps the most famous Bigfoot evidence, the “Patterson Footage” was captured along Bluff Creek in Northern California, and it depicts a tall bipedal creature with either “silvery-brown,” “dark reddish brown,” or “black fur” slowly lumbering out of sight into the lush forest area. According to the cameraman, Patterson, his horse reared back and threw him off upon seeing the Bigfoot, and then he immediately took out his 16mm movie camera. Running at 16 frames per second, the film initially jumps and blurred badly, disallowing any identification of any sort. As his distance with the creature closes to about 80 feet, the sasquatch rotates its head to look at Patterson. In his book Bigfoot Prints: A scientific Inquiry into the Reality of Sasquatch, Grover Krantz, an anthropologist and cryptozoologist, described how Patterson told him about the bigfoot in the film, “As Patterson told me: ‘it looked at me with such an expression of contempt and disgust, that I just stayed right there.’ The way he put it to John Green was ‘You know how it is when the umpire tells you “one more word and you’re out of the game”; that’s the way it felt.’ ” Near the end of the film, Paterson moves to the left, and now the creature is moving almost directly away from him. The camera suddenly runs out of film. After the creature left, Patterson and Gimlin made casts of the remaining footprints and nine days later taxidermist Robert Titmus did too, and also drew a map marking the paths of Patterson, Gimlin, and the alleged Bigfoot. The authenticity of this film since has become a controversial debate among scientists. The two options are clear: either the film depicts a real undiscovered bigfoot species, or it is a human in a hairy suit. Patterson film advocates often note the appearance of muscles and the smooth body movement as evidence, neither of which would apparently be achieved by a suit or costume of any sort. Critics disagree, however; some, like Cliff Crook and Chris Murphy, claim to have exposed the suit’s zip fastener. In addition to attracting the attention of mainstream scientists, the Patterson-Gimlin footage also caught the eye of TV programs. MonsterQuest is a show that aired on the History channel from 2007-2010 focusing on cryptozoology and was advertised as taking a “scientific” approach to these subjects. In one episode, scientists Jurgen Konczak and Esteban Sarmiento try to see if a mime can impersonate the exact movement of the Patterson creature. The mime couldn’t pull it off. At the end of the show, the show concludes that the evidence they gathered is “intriguing but inconclusive.”
Although Bigfoot sightings usually occur in remote forested areas, the monkey man of New Delhi, otherwise known as Kaala Bandar (which translates to black monkey), is an aggressive black-haired bipedal monkey creature with a metal helmet that was said to roam in New Delhi in 2001. In the month of May ‘01, residents in the capital started reporting a 4 ft (or sometimes 8 ft) monkey/man creature that leapt across rooftops and attacked people by scratching them. These reports caused terror in the highly populated and close quartered areas of the capital. After police became majorly involved, the situation came to an end and the local police tagged it as “mass hysteria.” A similar creature supposedly lives in Northern India too; the Mande Barung inhabits the Meghalaya subtropical forests, although the area is far more remote then busy New Delhi.
In 1976, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) started a file on Bigfoot.
Peter Byrne, the founder and head of The Bigfoot Information Center in Oregon, had dedicated his life to finding bigfoot. In ‘76 he sent 15 samples of unidentified hair pieces to the FBI, hoping they could pinpoint their origin. Jay Cochran Jr., who was the assistant director of the FBI’s scientific and technical services
Before sending his hair samples to the FBI, Peter Bryne had already been travelling the world to search for the bigfoot phenomenon. His website says he participated in five Himalayan expeditions searching for Yeti, and three major Pacific Northwest research projects in search of Sasquatch. Beginning after his service for the in World War 2, he spent time in Northern India and eventually went on his first small expedition into the middle Himalaya. After leaving the British Royal Air Force, he went back several times. On one of his expeditions, he saw the famous Yeti scalp in person.
The Yeti scalp is held in a village in Nepal called Khumjung and is supposedly the scalp of a 300 year old Yeti. In 1960, Sir Edmund Hillary borrowed the scalp and took it to London for examination. The results stated that the hairs were extremely similar to the Serow hair sample, and it was perhaps a local variety of the species.
There have been many attempts done by experts and scientists to try and discover a reason of Bigfoot’s existence and why there is no decisive evidence yet. Some note the fact that there are many forests and habitats where there are multiple sightings that are virtually untouched, whether it be because of the massive size, difficult travel terrain, or general unpopularity. For example, the Northern Forest Complex in Myanmar (Burma) holds many subtropical forests that are located on steep inclines in the mountainous regions. According to this paper, several reports of ‘wildmen’ have been made in Northern Myanmar, usually describing a bipedal primate with vocalizations and a strong odor. Witnesses say they are “120-245 cm in height, and covered in longish pale to orange-red hair with a head-neck ruff.”
Some scientists suggest the creatures reported to be “bigfoot” are an extinct species in the family of hominidae. One possibility would be Gigantopithecus blacki, a close relative to the orangutan, only much bigger, and it went extinct around 300,000 years ago. Its remains were only found in China, however, and it would not account for the thousands of ‘Bigfoot’ (or a similar creature) sightings all over the world.
So is Bigfoot real? By the nature of science, it would be difficult for a creature of that size to sustain and shield itself from human society for this long. Most scientists agree that this elusive creature is just a figment of imagination, culture, and legend, and do not consider Bigfoot as an existing animal. Some experts will always disagree. Jane Goodall, an English anthropologist and primatologist who has made groundbreaking discoveries in the field, believes Bigfoot might exist. In an interview with Yahoo entertainment, she noted how every continent in the world has a Bigfoot equivalent. “There’s something, I don’t know what it is... I’m always open minded.” Mainstream media and entertainment has had a part in popularising Bigfoot. Today, there are even shows like Animal Planet’s “Finding Bigfoot,” which aimed at capturing evidence of the creature. Ironically, the show ended two years ago without ever finding Bigfoot.
In the end, unless there is DNA, body, or clear and unblurry film evidence, there is no certain way to authenticate Bigfoot. So for now, it's merely just a legend. The Legend of Bigfoot.
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