Bigfoot (Sasquatch)
A giant, man-like creature of North American folklore, named after oversized footprints found at a California logging site in 1958.
Meaning
On the morning of 27 August 1958 Jerry Crew, a bulldozer operator for Wallace Construction, found huge prints of bare feet around his machine on a logging road in Humboldt County, California. That October Andrew Genzoli, a columnist on the Humboldt Times, put the story on his front page and shortened the loggers' name for the trackmaker to one word, Bigfoot; the wire services carried it to papers across the country (Mental Floss; The Seattle Times).
Were the 1958 footprints a hoax?
When Ray Wallace, one of the construction company's owners and a well-known prankster, died in 2002, his family said he had made the tracks himself, and a nephew said he still had the carved alder-wood feet used to press them into the dirt (The Seattle Times, 5 December 2002). The California Sun called it "a damaging blow" to the story, though interest in Bigfoot carried on regardless.
See also
Yeti (Abominable Snowman), Kraken, Sea serpent, Loch Ness Monster, Champ (Lake Champlain monster), Yeti (Abominable Snowman).
Sources
- The Hoax That Led to the Word ‘Bigfoot’ (Mental Floss), Mental Floss, Mental Floss
- Lovable trickster created a monster with Bigfoot hoax (The Seattle Times, 5 December 2002), Bob Young, The Seattle Times, 5 December 2002, The Seattle Times
- When California introduced Bigfoot to the world (California Sun, 2018), Mike McPhate, California Sun, 7 August 2018, California Sun
Last reviewed September 28, 2026 by Rory Hansen. How we research