Twenty years ago, in this magazine I wrote an overview of the evidence for Bigfoot. Titled “Bigfoot at 50: A Half-Century of Bigfoot Evidence,” it was meant to give skeptics and layfolk alike a concise overview of the variety and quality of evidence proffered to date for the existence of the elusive bipedal creature said to roam North America.
The birth of Bigfoot (as a phenomenon, if not as a corporal creature) is complex and closely linked with its Canadian cousin Sasquatch (see, for example, Loxton and Prothero 2013 and Regal 2011). How long Bigfoot has been around is of course unknowable; the fifty years mentioned in the original piece was a rough estimate including a seminal December 1959 True magazine article describing the discovery of large, mysterious footprints the year before in Bluff Creek, California. They turned out to have been the work of Ray Wallace, who is acknowledged to have made countless hoaxed tracks, using various carved wooden feet, throughout the 1950s and 1960s. Though there were others at the time, the Bluff Creek tracks were not only demonstrably faked (his relatives revealed the hoax upon his death, including some of the “big feet”used) but widely regarded as evidence both key and credible. Here I’ve adopted a longer view of the phenomenon, reaching back some sixty-five years since infamous tracks propelled Bigfoot into the public’s consciousness; it would be another nine years before the one-minute film shot by Roger Patterson and Bob Gimlin cemented the creature’s international fame in celluloid.
As we approach a quarter-century into the new millennium, Bigfoot is nowhere to be seen. While Nessie searches and chupacabra reports still make the news with some regularity, Bigfoot—once ubiquitous, from monster trucks to pizzas, beef jerky to the Six Million Dollar Man—has been relegated to a handful of cryptid conferences and the occasional fruitless “reality” television search. In fact, Bigfoot hasn’t even appeared on the cover of this magazine for well over a decade (that’s me in a Bigfoot costume on the March/April 2002 cover).