The Legend of Bigfoot

According to the Washington Military Department - The legends of Bigfoot go back beyond recorded history and cover the world. In North America – and particularly the Northwest – you can hear tales of seven-foot-tall hairy men stalking the woods, occasionally scaring campers, lumberjacks, hikers and the like.

Bigfoot is known by many titles with many different cultures although the name Bigfoot is generally attributed to the mountainous Western region of North America. The common name Sasquatch comes from the Salish Sasquits, while the Algonquin of the north-central region of the continent refer to a Witiko or Wendigo. Other nations tell of a large creature much like a man but imbued with special powers and characteristics. The Ojibway of the Northern Plains believed the Rugaru appeared in times of danger and other nations agreed that the hairy apparition was a messenger of warning, telling man to change his ways.

North American settlers started reporting sightings during the late 1800s and into the 1900s with the occasional finding of footprints, sporadic encounters and even a few grainy photos and videos adding to the mystery. Those who claim to have seen Bigfoot have described everything from a large, upright ape to an actual hairy human, sometimes standing over eight feet tall and described as powerfully built. The debate and research continue. Entire organizations exist to study and document Bigfoot and prove its existence and groups regularly search the Northwest woods, looking for that ultimate proof. (https://mil.wa.gov/the-legend-of-bigfoot)

Bigfoot Field Researchers Organization (http://bfro.net/) Founded in 1995, a scientific research organization exploring the bigfoot/sasquatch mystery. Report your Bigfoot sightings to the BFRO.

Bigfoot is a large and mysterious humanoid creature purported to inhabit the wild and forested areas of Oregon and the West Coast of North America. Bigfoot is also known as Sasquatch, an Anglicization of the name Sasq’ets, from the Halq’emeylem language spoken by First Nations peoples in southwestern British Columbia.

Most people who believe in Bigfoot’s existence, or claim to have seen one, assert that they are hair-covered bipeds with apelike features up to eight feet tall that leave correspondingly large footprints. They are generally characterized as nonaggressive animals, whose shyness and humanlike intelligence make them elusive and thus rarely seen, though some wilderness travelers claim to have smelled their stench or heard their screams and whistles.

A few physical anthropologists, such as Jeff Meldrum at Idaho State University and Grover Krantz at Washington State University, have espoused the biological reality of Bigfoot based on their examination of the 1967 film footage of a purported Bigfoot taken in northern California’s Klamath Mountains or on their morphological analysis of footprints, some of which exhibit dermal ridges, as those found in the 1980s by a U.S. Forest Service employee in the Blue Mountains of northeastern Oregon.