“Most researchers who study the bigfoot subject will point to the abundance of witnesses as the factor they found most compelling about the mystery when first becoming acquainted with it. Over the course of time, bigfoot researchers meet enough eyewitnesses to realize there are indeed many, many eyewitness across the continent who are indeed very credible. Often there are multiple witnesses to a given sighting or encounter.
“There are, in fact, way too many eyewitnesses for this phenomenon to be purely imaginary, as skeptics assert. With such an abundance of eyewitnesses, who are so dispersed across the continent, and dispersed across the decades, the alternate skeptical explanation that the sightings are the result of hoaxers, in whole or even in large part, becomes much less likely.
“Researchers eventually come to realize that if there are indeed so many credible eyewitnesses across the land, then the species they so consistently and emphatically describe probably exists also.”
“The mystery behind the sightings of sasquatches (a term used interchangeably with bigfoot) took on a new dimension in the 1960’s when Dr. Grover Krantz of Washington State University began examining casts and photos of footprints from various parts of Washington. One of the sets of casts showed anatomical features of an injured foot that were either made by a real upright-walking primate, or an artist with an expert understanding of primate foot anatomy.”
“The Patterson-Gimlin film is widely regarded as one of the strongest pieces of evidence for the existence of sasquatches.
“The footage was obtained in a remote mountainous area in northern California in 1967. The two men involved were Roger Patterson and Bob Gimlin. Patterson was a rodeo rider from Yakima, Washington. He was trying to make a documentary about the bigfoot mystery when he went down to northern California with a rental 16mm movie camera after hearing about numerous tracks in the valley around Bluff Creek.
“The footage has been repeatedly analyzed by scientists over the last 40 years. It has never been proven to be a hoax, yet various individuals have “confessed” to being the man in the costume over the years. All of the confessions contradict each other, and are strongly suspected of being hoaxes themselves. No one has ever brought forward the actual costume involved, and no one has ever been able to create a matching costume, though many have tried.
“The difficulty in creating a matching costume has to do with the limb ratios. The figure in the footage has shorter legs and larger arms, proportionally, than a human. The differences are most apparent when the figure is juxtaposed to the figure of a human in a bigfoot costume.”
“The difficulty in creating a matching costume has to do with the limb ratios. The figure in the footage has shorter legs and larger arms, proportionally, than a human. The differences are most apparent when the figure is juxtaposed to the figure of a human in a bigfoot costume.”
“Most of the native tribes across North America have stories in their oral traditions describing giant hairy figures that look and behave very similar to what many Americans and Canadians have described over the past few centuries.
“The tribes are spread across all the linguistic groups of native languages. Every native linguistic group has its own name for these figures, suggesting the stories of these figures did not all arise in the same place.
“Sightings continue to happen on certain native reservations in the United States and Canada — those reservations with an abundance of natural food sources.”
“There are many examples of recordings attributed to the sounds of Bigfoots, which are very distinct from the sounds of other animals.
“Bigfoots are said to make loud howls and screams at night, as well as wood knocking sounds or rock clacking sounds.
“The most compelling collection of recordings was obtained in California’s Sierra Nevada Mountains in the 1970’s with the help of a newspaper journalist from Sacramento. Those recordings, called the ‘Sierra Sounds’ collection, are widely believed to be authentic recordings of bigfoots. A few of those recordings captured what sounds like a primitive language.
“Sound recordings have been obtained in eastern states as well, such as Ohio, Mississippi and Florida.”
“Beginning in the late 1990’s and continuing for the next 10 years, fingerprint expert Jimmy Chilcutt in Texas began examining details in track casts obtained in various parts of the country.
“He noticed distinct dermal ridges in some of the casts. Some of the nearly microscopic details showed healed scars where the skin had been previously cut or damaged. Some of the casts showed larger longitudinal ridges, which were also thought to be dermal ridges, originally.
“Other researchers later demonstrated that those larger longitudinal ridges could have been created inadvertently in the process of pouring the liquified plaster into the track impression. The more microscopic details of the healed dermal scars however were not caused that way.
“The healed scar patterns tend to confirm the authenticity of the tracks in question.”
Content courtesy of the BFRO.
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