THE STORY & ITS AFTERLIVES
Bigfoot is described as a bipedal giant two to three meters tall, covered in dark brown or black hair, with massive shoulders, a bent-kneed stride, and bare footprints up to forty centimeters long. Witnesses often report a powerful rotten stench, deep howls, and the sound of wood knocking. Its heartland is the coniferous forest of Washington, Oregon, and northern California, though reports come from across North America.
The name was coined in 1958, when road-crew worker Jerry Crew cast enormous footprints found around a construction site at Bluff Creek in Humboldt County, California; columnist Andrew Genzoli of the Humboldt Times printed the story and "Bigfoot" spread nationwide. After foreman Ray Wallace died in 2002, his family produced carved wooden feet and said those prints had been his prank. The older name "Sasquatch" was adapted in 1929 by schoolteacher J. W. Burns from sasq'ets, a word in the Halkomelem language of British Columbia's Coast Salish peoples.
On October 20, 1967, Roger Patterson and Bob Gimlin shot roughly a minute of 16mm film at Bluff Creek showing a hair-covered female figure striding across a sandbar and glancing back at the camera — the famous frame 352. The footage remains disputed: believers call it definitive, skeptics see a man in a fur suit. Bigfoot has since settled into American popular culture, from beer commercials to highway signs, and Skamania County, Washington passed an ordinance against killing one in 1969.
