Bigfoot

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Names & Creature Profile

Bigfoot is the hairy biped of North American encounter reports: upright, apelike, often glimpsed before it disappears among trees. Robert Walls’s Oregon history describes conspicuous tracks, cries and whistles. Much of the creature’s public identity rests on something left behind rather than a body clearly seen. [2]

Historical Record

A particularly clear investigation survives in correspondence from the Bigfoot Information Center and Exhibition at The Dalles, Oregon. Its director, Peter Byrne, wrote to FBI Assistant Director Jay Cochran on November 24, 1976. About fifteen hairs adhered to a tiny piece of skin, and Byrne’s organization could not identify them. He called this the first sample in six years that he thought might be important and requested a comparative analysis. That statement recorded his hope for the material; the question he put to the laboratory was whether it could identify the hairs. [9]

Cochran agreed on December 15. The FBI laboratory ordinarily examined evidence for criminal investigations, he explained, but sometimes made exceptions for research and scientific inquiry. He directed Byrne to send the material to the Scientific Analysis Section and to include whatever background was available about its source. The agreement created a practical next step: a specimen could be compared with known material. It did not require the laboratory to accept the proposed creature before looking. [9]

The answer came in a February 24, 1977 letter to Howard S. Curtis, executive vice president of the Academy of Applied Science, who had delivered the hairs on the center’s behalf. The laboratory used transmitted and incident light microscopy, examining root and internal structure, the outer covering and scale casts. It also compared the sample directly with hairs of known origin. Cochran reported a deer-family identification and returned the sample with his letter. The laboratory’s reply gives a result specific to the material that reached it. It names neither a deer species nor the animal’s original collection circumstances. [9]

Homeland & Tradition

Sts’ailes, formerly known as Chehalis, is a sovereign Coast Salish First Nation in southwestern British Columbia. Its traditional territory includes the Harrison and Chehalis lakes and rivers. The community describes its relationship with these waters and the surrounding land through care and responsibility: people are part of an interdependent living world whose well-being affects their own. That public explanation provides the setting for a name familiar far beyond the territory. [7][8]

The Sts’ailes-owned Sasquatch Crossing Eco Lodge explains Sasquatch as an anglicized pronunciation of Sa:sq’ets, a caretaker who watches over the land. Kelsey Charlie of the Sts’ailes Sasquatch Dancers recalls elders teaching that he was not a monster to fear. This is a community’s account of a culturally important presence, with its own relationships and responsibilities. It is not simply an older version of an investigator’s search for an unknown ape. [1]

Nature & Powers

Charlie connects Sa:sq’ets with supernatural transformation and the choice to become visible. He recalls elders describing focused attention on moonlit nights, when light and an undistracted observer might make a sighting possible. [1]

Tales & Encounters

Wildlife biologist John Mionczynski recalls a remote camping night in Sidedoor’s published transcript. Breathing and a shadow wake him; he thinks of a bear and shouts, striking the shape through his tent. It retreats, then returns. A later blow meets something hard. A large handlike silhouette rises above him, and the tent partly collapses. He scrambles out and sits by the fire beneath his sleeping bag. As he grows drowsy, pine cones begin falling nearby, then land around him and the fire. He stays put until the presence leaves. After he hikes out, his employer suggests Bigfoot; later, according to the program, disagreement over discussing it at work ends with Mionczynski quitting. [4]

An animal complaint reproduced by Library of Congress folklorist Meg Nicholas records a different night, July 31, 2000, at Maryland’s Arundel Mills construction site. Three workers staying in a van report a large animal running on two legs and flee to a parking lot. An officer persuades them to return; they find a print. When he points out reflected eyes near a pond, they flee again. He stays, waits with his lights off, then illuminates a large dark animal on the hillside. His air horn produces no immediate reaction. The animal eventually moves away. He requests wildlife assistance and provisionally identifies what he saw as a bear. [3]

Appearance & Signs

A footprint can invite an anatomical reconstruction. In the Smithsonian’s Sidedoor transcript, anthropologist Grover Krantz is persuaded by Bossburg casts depicting an apparently impaired foot. He considers their detail too convincing to fabricate. The proposed body remains an interpretation of the impressions. [4]

The casts offer an apparent body part for inspection, while Byrne’s hairs offer actual material. In both cases, a proposed identity must be tested against what the trace can show. [4][9]

Landscape & Associations

Walls traces settler reports to Oregon’s Sixes River in 1904 and miners’ accounts on Mount St. Helens in 1924. Logging-road reports gained attention after 1958. Serious claims, jokes, chainsaw carvings and deliberately made prints shared this working landscape: an encounter might also become a practical joke. [2]

The Sts’ailes territorial description gives a different kind of specificity. Harrison and Chehalis waterways connect with wetlands, floodplains, mountain lakes and glacial peaks; ancestral settlements and seasonal places of hunting, fishing and gathering belonged throughout this country. Sa:sq’ets is introduced here within land already known, named and lived with, rather than a blank wilderness awaiting discovery. [7][1]

Meaning & Belief

The telling can have consequences beyond the encounter. Nicholas describes a 1973 interview with schoolteacher Corinne Fasinski, who remembered frightened children and teachers around Orting, Washington, without claiming a sighting herself. A Tennessee teenager interviewed in 1977 did claim one, but disliked the ridicule that followed. One account remembers collective alarm; the other defends a personal experience. [3]

Crair finds another appeal in the search itself: tracks, smells and broken branches can make a familiar walk feel full of possibilities. He connects the creature with an imagined freedom from a thoroughly managed world. That attraction need not be the motive of every witness. It helps explain why looking can remain rewarding even when the hoped-for discovery does not arrive. [5]

Variants & Kindred Beings

Ben Crair’s Smithsonian Magazine reporting places Bigfoot beside the Australian Yowie and Himalayan Yeti: shaggy upright figures recur across these images. Their resemblance is a starting point for comparison, not a shared identity. The places, names and histories require separate accounts. [5]

The distinction becomes practical when samples from different traditions enter one study. Bryan Sykes and colleagues invited hairs attributed to anomalous primates from individual and museum collections. Their 2014 paper labels each sample by its reported origin and attribution before giving a genetic match. The name “Bigfoot” in that table records what a submitted hair was supposed to represent. It is not the identification produced by the test. A researcher can compare several claims with the same method without assuming that all the named beings are one creature. [6]

Later Retellings & Reception

Crair’s 2018 account finds the figure in children’s films, television and online images. Cryptozoologist Loren Coleman complains that obvious fabrications distract from evidence proponents want examined. The same circulation that makes Bigfoot instantly recognizable can make a particular claim harder to follow back to its source. [5]

The laboratory letters offer a useful counterpoint to that abundance. They preserve a request, instructions, an examination and a returned sample. The interest lies in the entire sequence rather than the dramatic fact that an agency kept a Bigfoot file. Without the last letter, a reader would have the request and the authority of the institution, but would lose the answer the institution actually gave. [9]

Evidence & Open Questions

Sykes and his coauthors began with fifty-seven submissions. Preliminary inspection eliminated a piece of plant material and a glass fiber; thirty-seven samples were selected for genetic analysis, and thirty yielded DNA sequences. The researchers cleaned the hairs to reduce contamination and compared a short mitochondrial sequence with reference sequences. A match could identify a familiar mammal, although the short segment did not always distinguish closely related species. [6]

For the samples labeled Bigfoot, Table 1 includes American black bear, raccoon, sheep, horse, cow, porcupine, human and deer matches. Several fell within the wolf, coyote or dog group without resolving which member. The table replaces a single exciting label with several ordinary and quite different origins. It also shows why “the hair was tested” is an incomplete statement: the result, the method’s resolution and the sample’s original attribution all matter. [6]

The thirty successful sequences covered submissions associated with several named creatures, not thirty Bigfoot sightings. Seven selected samples yielded no sequence. Neither an unsuccessful test nor an observation without a collected sample establishes a new primate. Conversely, the result for a submitted hair does not identify every animal someone has seen. The paper’s useful achievement is narrower and concrete: material that had traveled under extraordinary names could be compared, and its results made available for others to examine. [6]

Byrne’s sample had taken an earlier route through microscopy rather than DNA analysis. The FBI’s final letter closes with its return. The hairs could go back to their sender, but now the file carried something it had lacked at the beginning: an identification reached by comparison, rather than the promise attached to an unknown scrap of skin.

Sources & Manuscript Notes

The three laboratory letters span November 1976 to February 1977. Read together, Byrne’s request, Cochran’s instructions and the final identification establish the course of this particular examination. [9]

Our Story and Story of the Sasquatch ↗
Sts’ailes; attributed passage by Kelsey Charlie · Sts’ailes / Sasquatch Crossing Eco Lodge
Our Story; Story of the Sasquatch
A public Sts’ailes explanation, including Kelsey Charlie’s attributed account.
Checked 2026-10-11
Bigfoot (Sasquatch) legend ↗
Robert Walls · Oregon Historical Society / Oregon Encyclopedia · Updated 7 September 2022
Article body and Further Reading
The films, casts and books discussed by Walls were not independently examined.
Checked 2026-10-11
On the Trail of Bigfoot in the Library of Congress ↗
Meg Nicholas · Library of Congress, American Folklife Center · 3 May 2024
Authored article body; excludes reader comments
The interviews and police report are consulted through Nicholas’s article, not the original recordings or police file.
Checked 2026-10-11
Seriously Seeking Sasquatch ↗
Haleema Shah / Sidedoor production team · Smithsonian Institution, Sidedoor · 31 October 2018
Expanded Transcript
The published transcript was read; the episode audio was not independently heard.
Checked 2026-10-11
Why Do So Many People Still Want to Believe in Bigfoot? ↗

Artwork

Illuminated folios

Select a folio to enlarge it. Its caption describes the account, landscape or artistic choices behind the image.

An indistinct shaggy upright figure partly hidden behind immense conifer trunks above a moonlit forest stream, within a dark fern frame. — An original imaginative silhouette inspired by modern reports of a hairy upright forest figure. This painting is not a sighting record or a depiction of the distinct Sts'ailes public account of Sa:sq'ets.

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