Bigfoot: The Giant Footprints in the Forest

In 1958, Jerry Crew was clearing land for a logging company in Humboldt County, California, when he came upon something that stopped him cold: a set of massive, human-like footprints pressed into the mud of the Six Rivers National Forest. Sixteen inches long, they belonged to nothing he could identify. When he mentioned it to his coworkers, several said they had seen similar tracks before, along with stranger incidents, like a 450-pound oil drum moved without explanation.

The loggers began calling the mystery culprit 'Bigfoot.' Crew, convinced at first that someone was playing a prank, eventually made a plaster cast of one footprint and brought it to reporter Andrew Genzoli of the Humboldt Times. On October 6, 1958, the newspaper ran a front-page photo of Crew holding the cast. The story spread fast, picked up by the New York Times and Los Angeles Times, and the name Bigfoot entered the American vocabulary almost overnight.

The creature wasn't new to North American folklore, though the name was. In 1929, Indian agent J.W. Burns had published stories collected from the Sts'ailes Nation in Maclean's magazine, coining the term 'Sasquatch' from the Halq'emeylem word sasq'ets, meaning 'hairy man.' Burns described a tribe of hairy people believed to live in the mountains, in tunnels and caves. According to Turkish-language sources, the first person said to have seen the creature's footprints was British explorer David Thompson, in 1811.

Over the decades, descriptions of Bigfoot have varied but converge on certain features: a large, muscular, bipedal figure covered in black, dark brown, or dark reddish hair, standing anywhere from 6 to 9 feet tall by most accounts, with some claims stretching to 10 or even 15 feet. Witnesses often describe broad shoulders, no visible neck, and long arms — traits skeptics say match a bear standing upright more than any unknown primate.

In 1971, the strangeness reached an official level: multiple residents of The Dalles, Oregon, filed a police report describing an 'overgrown ape.' One man claimed he'd had the creature in his rifle scope but couldn't pull the trigger because, in his words, it looked more human than animal. Michael Rugg, who runs the Bigfoot Discovery Museum, has claimed to have smelled the creature, comparing it to a skunk that had rolled in dead animals and garbage.