Bigfoot Is in the Woods, Our Hearts and Our Nightmares

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What pop culture figure of the 1970s had his own board game, guest-starred on “The Six Million Dollar Man” and terrorized backwoods campers with his screams in the night and his skunky smell?

You know him, you love him … Bigfoot.

In the 1970s, Bigfoot was a pop culture thing that kids were unduly worried about, like quicksand and the Bermuda Triangle. A genre of movies and TV shows sprang up around the legend and it persists to this day. 

I even had a brush with the Bigfoot legend a couple of decades ago – not with Bigfoot, I should add, but with Bigfoot hoaxers, which are as much a part of the Bigfoot mythos as the sometimes-amiable, sometimes brutal cryptid himself.

And you can’t discount the tourism that has grown up around Bigfoot, including festivals and exhibits and museums. 

Bigfoot is a part of our lives and always will be.

But maybe you’re one of those who are thinking, what the hell is Bigfoot?

The backwoods legend through the years

Bigfoot is the hairy dude walking in front of some trees in that gif you’ve seen so many times.

What? You need to know more?

Bigfoot is a tall, hairy, smelly ape-like yet human-like creature that’s classified, by Bigfoot researchers, as a cryptid, a class of mythological beings like the Loch Ness monster: They’re creatures that don’t exist except in the tales of people with unsettling encounters, cryptid devotees, hoaxers and popular culture.

Bigfoot specifically is among a brotherhood of ape-like cryptids that include the Skunk Ape, Yeti, the Abominable Snowman and your various swamp monsters. 

The legend of these creatures has been present in and civilizations all around the globe for hundreds and hundreds of years. It was in the past 500 years that Western society began to take notice.  

A search of newspaper archives turns up plenty of references to the term “Bigfoot” from the early 1800s, including references to Bigfoot Lake in Wisconsin in August 1836. The lake was likely named after a Potawatomi tribe leader who was legendary for the size of his feet. In the early 1800s in Wisconsin, there were, surprisingly, a few people whose last name was Bigfoot. 

But the most interesting of early newspaper references to a Bigfoot – even if not by that name – is a reference to an unidentified creature in a 1780 article in the American Daily Advertiser in Philadelphia. The article, “Account of a wild man seen in the Pyrenees,” noted, “This man … was very tall, covered with hair like a bear, nimble … of a gay humour and, in all appearance a mild character.” He liked to spook sheep and laugh heartily. There’s no mention of the word Bigfoot proper in the article. 

In July 1920, a newspaper in Kane, Pennsylvania recounted reports of a “monster ape” in the woods that frightened people near the Ohio River. The creature blocked a road that people were walking on. No reports of hearty laughter, though.

Expeditions to extreme mountain ranges like the Himalayas brought back what were purported to be photographs of Yeti tracks (from Eric Shipton’s 1951 expedition) and alleged Yeti skin and fur (Renowned explorer Edmund Hillary’s 1952 expedition). “In the 1950s and early 1960s, the world was in the grip of Yeti mania,” Atlas Obscura wrote in 2022 in a piece printed in Mother Jones.

Hillary set out, in 1960 and 1961, to chart more of the Himalayas and, as a side quest, to get some evidence about the Yeti. Among those on the expedition was Marlin Perkins, director of the Lincoln Park Zoo, who would later be best known as the host of the TV nature series “Wild Kingdom.” 

The Sherpa people in Nepal believed there were not one but three distinct types of Yeti. One was the traditional eight-foot-tall, hairy creature with claws, another was man-sized and another was “a sad-faced, dwarf-sized beast” known as the Thelma. 

The group didn’t find Yeti of any kind but did find footprints in the snow made by feet that, if they were measured for shoes, would wear size 11 or even as large as 15. 

Hillary dismissed the footprints, suggesting they were the tracks of snow leopards or wolves enlarged as the snow melted. He later said that he could not consider the existence of the Yeti as “more than a fascinating fairy tale” among the native people of the area.

But Bigfoot, Yeti, Sasquatch, the Abominable Snowman and their kind could not be extinguished from the public’s imagination. Proponents of the theory that the creatures existed spent the next several years mounting expeditions and giving talks in every locale. 

“It appears we have one right here in Northern California,” a columnist wrote in the Siskiyou (California) Daily News in March 1961. “The difference is that our man is known by the name Bigfoot.”

An article for the History Collection website notes that Northern California was where the Bigfoot name came from. Back in 1958, construction workers were unnerved by huge tracks and feats of strength like moving 450-pound oil barrels.

One of the crew bosses coined the nickname “Bigfoot,” which caught on and became synonymous with the American version of the Yeti.

By the time the crew members admitted, in 2002, that they had created the Bigfoot tracks, the legend had long since become a part of popular culture.

The existence of Bigfoot had become even more a fervent belief after 1967, when a film crew that included Roger Patterson and Bob Gimlin captured footage that has become familiar all over the world: A large, ape-like creature that walked like a man. It’s an image and footage that’s been part of the national consciousness ever since and parodied many times, including in the 2003 movie “Elf,” when Will Farrell’s title character is captured on film in Central Park. 

Bigfoot in pop culture reached its peak in the 1970s.

‘Boggy Creek’ and ‘Six Million Dollar Man’

You don’t fight the Six-Million Dollar Man and escape the notice of the nation’s television viewers.

At least you didn’t in 1976, when the two-part episode “The Secret of Bigfoot” aired on the ABC TV series “The Six Million Dollar Man.” Steve Austin, the bionic government agent, goes in search of an answer to strange goings-on in the woods. Austin, played by Lee Majors, runs into Bigfoot, played by professional wrestler and actor (“The Princess Bride”) Andre the Giant. Bigfoot returned in later episodes, as played by Ted “Lurch” Cassidy, but the fearsome appearance of the creature – strong and hairy and fangs and glowing eyes – inspired nightmares in younger viewers.

Even before those memorable episodes, Bigfoot-type creatures had appeared in movies and TV shows. Later, in 1987, the family comedy “Harry and the Hendersons” depicted Bigfoot as a curious, smiling giant only too happy to be accepted into a family. It was a long way from what’s probably the best-known film about Bigfoot. 

“The Legend of Boggy Creek” was released in 1972 and unspooled on drive-in movie screens for years to follow. The film, a pseudo-docudrama, was made on a shoestring budget by director Charles B. Pierce depicted the “legend” of the Fouke Monster in rural Arkansas. The very fact of its limited budget worked to Pierce’s advantage. The film’s monster was little seen but its eerie cries were haunting. 

Likewise, the “The Legend of Boggy Creek” advertising campaign was ingenious. The movie was largely sold through local TV and radio commercials and the poster for the film, showing the silhouette of a creature loping through a swamp, is one of the best movie posters ever created because it accomplishes what it is intended to do: make young moviegoers ready to shell out a couple of bucks, including the cost of popcorn, to see the movie. (Pierce would go on to direct an equally legendary exploitation picture, “The Town That Dreaded Sundown,” in 1976.) Bigfoot was featured not only in other movies and TV shows but books and boardgames, including “The Bigfoot Game” from 1987.

And, of course, there were Bigfoot action figures and toys drawn from “The Six Million Dollar Man” and other shows, including one that inexplicably has Bigfoot on something resembling … a scooter?

Bigfoot hoaxes à la mode

I had my own brush with Bigfoot. 

Actually, my own brush with Bigfoot hoaxers.

It was the summer of 2008 and cable TV news outlets and newspapers around the world reported that two Georgia men, Matthew Whitton and Rick Dyer, were in possession of a supposed Bigfoot carcass, which they kept in a chest freezer. Another man, a Bigfoot researcher named Steve Kulls, had tested the carcass and said it was a fake.

The testing was done, according to news accounts, in Muncie, Indiana, my hometown and the city where I was in my second decade as a newspaper reporter who covered government and politics with a side of weird stories about killer clowns and UFOs.

Now, considering that the first half of the Steven Spielberg UFO movie “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” took place – but was not filmed – in Muncie, it should not have been a surprise that my city had at some point become embroiled in a Bigfoot controversy. It’s like that episode of “The Simpsons” in which Homer gets a bucket stuck on his head and Bart remarks that it was surprising only in that it took so long to happen. 

Over the course of a few days, I tracked down leads on the reports and wrote a few articles. I quickly found that a man living in one of the rural communities around Muncie had filed a police complaint in Clayton County, Georgia, alleging that he was hoodwinked out of $50,000 by two men. Whitton and Dyer were not named as the scammers in an Atlanta Journal Constitution article, but Whitton and Dyer were later identified as the two men, who said they were just playing a joke when they claimed to have Bigfoot’s corpse in a chest freezer.

The Muncie man in my area had apparently brokered a deal between Whitton and Dyer and Tom Biscardi, a Bigfoot hunter. The Bigfoot remains were transported in that chest freezer from Georgia to California via a quick stop in Muncie. Of course. 

Within a few days of the initial reports, Bigfoot researcher Kulls had determined the sasquatch corpse was just a gorilla costume stuffed with animal entrails.

By the time I interviewed the local man who had claimed he had lost $50,000 to the hoaxers, he had clammed up tighter than the lid on Bigfoot’s chest freezer. 

“I don’t know anything about Bigfoot,” he told me. “I don’t have an opinion on Bigfoot.”

He was one of the few Americans who didn’t have an opinion about Bigfoot. 

Just like there are patriotic festivals and biscuit festivals and every type of festival that can be imagined by tourism officials, there are Bigfoot festivals and attractions and tours. A surprising number of them, actually. And while Bigfoot is the centerpiece of these festivals, they can be about anything the organizers want. The Smoky Mountain Bigfoot Festival, held May 6, featured a Bigfoot 5K run, chainsaw carvings, vendors and food trucks and celebrities like Giorgio A. Tsoukalos, the wild-haired writer and UFO expert from History Channel shows like “Ancient Aliens.”

Why do we care about Bigfoot? Someone with a philosophical bent would say that the Yeti, Sasquatch, Abominable Snowman and Bigfoot represent our wildest natures.

I think it’s likely that the appeal is a mix of our love for the mysterious, the unknown and unknowable, as well as our love for the pop culture figures of our childhood, whether battling the Six Million Dollar Man or shouting out unknowable sentiments from deep in a Southern swamp or a Northwestern forest.

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