Bigfoot

 

This article was written by Makala

Just like the Yowie in Australia and the Yeti in Asia, the Sasquatch—also known as Bigfoot—is a cryptid, reportedly seen around the Pacific Northwest region of Canada and the United States for hundreds of years. Keep reading to learn more about Bigfoot sightings in British Columbia.

The history of the Sasquatch

Legend has it that a Sasquatch is a large ape-like creature that walks on two feet and lives deep within forests. People have described them as reaching 2.75 meters (nine feet) in height, being very powerful and stealth, communicating through whistles and grunts, and emitting a horrible smell. The nickname Bigfoot comes from the fact that their footprints can measure up to 50 centimeters (19.6 inches). The Sasquatch is known as a cryptid, which means the scientific community hasn’t confirmed its existence. Its name and presence come from legends told by the Native First Nations of Canada’s Pacific Northwest.

J.W. Burns was the man behind the name Sasquatch, which he coined in the 1930s. An Indian agent assigned to the band now known as the Sts’ailes First Nations, Burns supposedly took the name from the Salish word Sasq’ets, which means “wild or hairy man.” The Sts’ailes believed that the Sasquatch could move between the physical and spiritual realm.

Sasquatch sightings

Sasquatch sightings go back as far as the 1800s when prospectors and miners from the Klondike Gold Rush in the Yukon told stories of wild ape-men. In British Columbia, over 200 Sasquatch sightings have been reported in the area of Harrison Hot Springs, Pitt Lake, Whistler and Squamish, Hope, Mission, and on Vancouver Island. People have also reported hearing the Sasquatch making high-pitched screams and howling at night across British Columbia.

A Sasquatch cave sits at Mystery Valley, on the west side of Harrison Lake at Harrison Hot Springs. It’s made up of approximately 60 meters (200 feet) of above-ground tubes, all interconnected to make Harry’s Home—both the apparent home of Sasquatch in Harrison Hot Springs and a fun children’s play area.

Sasquatch today

The last sighting on record was in 2014; Global News reported that a Sasquatch-like creature was seen trudging through snow in a remote area near Whistler.

The legend of the Sasquatch also lives on through Sasquatch!, a music festival, which happens annually on Memorial Day weekend. The festival takes place near Quincy in central Washington State, in an open area alongside the Columbia River.

  

In North American folklore, Bigfoot or Sasquatch is a hairy, upright-walking, ape-like creature who reportedly dwells in the wilderness and leaves behind footprints. Strongly associated with the Pacific Northwest (particularly Oregon, Washington and British Columbia), individuals claim to see the creature across North America. Over the years, the creature has inspired numerous commercial ventures and hoaxes.

People claim to have seen Bigfoot, describing it as a large, hairy, muscular, bipedal ape-like creature, roughly 6–9 feet (1.8–2.7 m), covered in hair described as black, dark brown, or dark reddish.

The enormous footprints for which the creature is named are claimed to be as large as 24 inches (60 cm) long and 8 inches (20 cm) 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

According to David Daegling, the legends existed before there was a single name for the creature. They differed in their details both regionally and between families in the same community.

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 own name for the creature featured in the local version of such legends. Many names meant something along the lines of "wild man" or "hairy man", although other names described common actions that it was said to perform, such as eating clams or shaking trees. Chief Mischelle of the Nlaka'pamux at Lytton, British Columbia told such a story to Charles Hill-Tout in 1898; he named the creature by a Salishan variant meaning "the benign-faced-one".

Members of the Lummi tell tales about Ts'emekwes, the local version of Bigfoot. 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 were a nocturnal race. Children were warned against saying the names, lest the monsters hear and come to carry off a person—sometimes to be killed. In 1847, Paul Kane reported stories by the Indians about skoocooms, a race of cannibalistic wildmen living on the peak of Mount St. Helens in southern Washington state.

Less-menacing versions have also been recorded, such as one by Reverend Elkanah Walker from 1840. Walker was a Protestant missionary who recorded stories of giants among the Indians living near Spokane, Washington. The Indians said that these giants lived on and around the peaks of nearby mountains and stole salmon from the fishermen's nets.

In the 1920s, Indian Agent J. W. Burns compiled local stories and published them in a series of Canadian newspaper articles. They were accounts told to him by the Sts'Ailes people of Chehalis and others. The Sts'Ailes and other regional tribes maintained that the Sasquatch were real. They were offended by people telling them that the figures were legendary. According to Sts'Ailes accounts, the Sasquatch preferred to avoid white men and spoke the Lillooet language of the people at Port Douglas, British Columbia at the head of Harrison Lake. These accounts were published again in 1940. Burns borrowed the term Sasquatch from the Halkomelem sásq'ets (IPA: [ˈsæsqʼəts]) and used it in his articles to describe a hypothetical single type of creature portrayed in the local stories.

Spotted Elk, bears, and the origin of the "Bigfoot" name

1895 article describing a giant grizzly bear named "Bigfoot".

The name "Big Foot" first gained renown by a Wyandot chief with that nickname in the 1830s "who derived his name from the immense size of his feet. His height considerably exceeded six feet, and his strength was represented as Herculean. He also had five brothers, but little inferior to himself in size and in courage, and as they generally went in company they were the terror of the country." Later in the 19th century Spotted Elk was also called Chief Big Foot; he was a well-known Lakota leader killed during the Wounded Knee Massacre in 1890. The two Native Americans may have been the namesakes for two fabled bears in the West. 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". This may have inspired the common name of the ape-creature and been a matter of confusion in early stories. The name began to become more widespread as a reference to the Sasquatch after a photo of bulldozer operator Jerry Crew holding a cast of a track was spread by wire service in 1958.

The first grizzly bear 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 nearly supernatural powers were attributed to it.

Nearly twice the size of an ordinary grizzly, Bigfoot for years has levied his tribute of prime steers and no one has been found brave enough or clever enough to catch or kill him. With a single blow of his giant paw he kills the largest and best animal he can find and he usually takes the pick of a herd. He makes a single meal of the animal, and it is usually a meal that would provide a camp full of men for a week, and disappears, never to return to that locality again that season.

Sightings

About one-third of all claims of Bigfoot sightings are located in the Pacific Northwest, with the remaining reports spread throughout the rest of North America. Most reports are considered mistakes or hoaxes, even by those researchers who say that Bigfoot exists.

Bigfoot has become better known and a phenomenon in popular culture, and sightings have spread throughout North America, but specifically in Windber PA. Rural areas of the Great Lakes region and the Southeastern United States have been sources of numerous reports of Bigfoot sightings, in addition to the Pacific Northwest. The debate over the legitimacy of Bigfoot sightings reached a peak in the 1970s, and Bigfoot has been regarded as the first widely popularized example of pseudoscience in American culture.

Misidentification

A 2007 photo of an unidentified animal that the Bigfoot Field Research Organization claims is a "juvenile Sasquatch"

In 2007, the Bigfoot Field Researchers Organization put forward some photos which they claimed showed a juvenile Bigfoot. The Pennsylvania Game Commission, however, said that the photos were of a bear with mange. Anthropologist Jeffrey Meldrum, and Ohio scientist Jason Jarvis on the other hand, said that the limb proportions of the creature were not bear-like, they were "more like a chimpanzee."

Hoaxes

Both Bigfoot believers and non-believers agree that many of the reported sightings are hoaxes or misidentified animals. Author Jerome Clark argues that the Jacko Affair was a hoax, involving an 1884 newspaper report of an apelike creature captured in British Columbia. He cites research by John Green, who found that several contemporaneous British Columbia newspapers regarded the alleged capture as highly dubious, and notes that the Mainland Guardian of New Westminster, British Columbia wrote, "Absurdity is written on the face of it."

Tom Biscardi is a long-time Bigfoot enthusiast and CEO of Searching for Bigfoot Inc. He appeared on the Coast to Coast AM paranormal radio show on July 14, 2005 and said that he was "98% sure that his group will be able to capture a Bigfoot which they had been tracking in the Happy Camp, California area." A month later, he announced on the same radio show that he had access to a captured Bigfoot and was arranging a pay-per-view event for people to see it. He appeared on Coast to Coast AM again a few days later to announce that there was no captive Bigfoot. He blamed an unnamed woman for misleading him, and said that the show's audience was gullible.

On July 9, 2008, Rick Dyer and Matthew Whitton posted a video to YouTube, claiming that they had discovered the body of a dead Sasquatch in a forest in northern Georgia. Tom Biscardi was contacted to investigate. Dyer and Whitton received $50,000 from Searching for Bigfoot, Inc. as a good faith gesture. The story was covered by many major news networks, including BBC, CNN, ABC News, and Fox News. Soon after a press conference, the alleged Bigfoot body was delivered in a block of ice in a freezer with the Searching for Bigfoot team. When the contents were thawed, observers found that the hair was not real, the head was hollow, and the feet were rubber. Dyer and Whitton admitted that it was a hoax after being confronted by Steve Kulls, executive director of SquatchDetective.com.[

In August 2012, a man in Montana was killed by a car while perpetrating a Bigfoot hoax using a ghillie suit.

In January 2014, Rick Dyer, perpetrator of a previous Bigfoot hoax, said that he had killed a Bigfoot creature in September 2012 outside San Antonio, Texas. He said that he had scientific tests performed on the body, "from DNA tests to 3D optical scans to body scans. It is the real deal. It's Bigfoot, and Bigfoot's here, and I shot it, and now I'm proving it to the world." He said that he had kept the body in a hidden location, and he intended to take it on tour across North America in 2014. He released photos of the body and a video showing a few individuals' reactions to seeing it, but never released any of the tests or scans. He refused to disclose the test results or to provide biological samples. He said that the DNA results were done by an undisclosed lab and could not be matched to identify any known animal. Dyer said that he would reveal the body and tests on February 9, 2014 at a news conference at Washington University, but he never made the test results available. After the Phoenix tour, the Bigfoot body was taken to Houston. On March 28, 2014, Dyer admitted on his Facebook page that his "Bigfoot corpse" was another hoax. He had paid Chris Russel of Twisted Toy Box to manufacture the prop from latex, foam, and camel hair, which he nicknamed "Hank". Dyer earned approximately US$60,000 from the tour of this second fake Bigfoot corpse. He said that he did kill a Bigfoot, but did not take the real body on tour for fear that it would be stolen.