Bigfoot

Bigfoot (Big Foot) is a common name for a North American crypto-hominid, coined by Gerald Crew in reference to the size of footprints discovered at a road construction site near Bluff Creek, Humboldt County, California in 1958. The creature is often conflated with J. W. Burns's earlier syncretic figuration of the Sasquatch, which was based on lore of First Nations in the Canadian province of British Columbia, and the Himalayan Yeti, which was popularised in the Western media as "The Abominable Snowman" in the late 19th and early 20th century.

Bluff Creek footprints (1958)
"”There is a mystery in the mountains of northeastern Humboldt County, waiting for a solution...'"

The first report of the "Bigfoot" made front page on the 4 October 1958 edition of the Humboldt Times. In the cover story, Andrew Genzoli gave a summary accounting of the claims made by Gerald Crew, a bulldozer operator (catskinner) working on a road construction team up around Bluff Creek, who had brought the Eureka-based paper a plaster casting of an enormous footprint that he said he had discovered at his work site. Follow-up investigative reports by Bill Chambers of the Humboldt Standard would link the footprinting activities to a group of local construction workers, particularly Ray Wallace; for his part, Wallace threatened to sue anyone who claimed he was involved in any hoax.

Patterson-Gimlin film (1967)



 * Bluff Creek, near Orleans, California
 * 20 October 1967
 * Roger Patterson, Robert Gimlin