How long has bigfoot been around

The Chinese believe a "Yeren" roams the western Hubei mountains. Australians say a "Yowie" stalks the Outback. By any name, this mythical creature is usually described as a bipedal hominid sporting a shaggy coat of hair covering its 8-tofoot-tall frame although sightings of "juveniles" also occur.

The brute can weigh pounds and leave footprints twice the size of a normal human adult's. Bigfoot believers contend the creature is the proverbial "missing link" between man and his evolutionary forbears. Have there been other hoaxes? Bigfoot's legend seems fertile terrain for rogues and raconteurs. In , a prospector named Albert Ostman came forward with a tale of having been abducted in by a Sasquatch — and forced to live with its family for six days, until he escaped.

In , two Georgia men, one a former policeman, claimed to have recovered a Bigfoot corpse in their native mountains — but after an international media frenzy, it was discovered they had purchased a Bigfoot costume and stuffed it with roadkill and animal entrails. But the most famous suspected hoax came just nine years after Wallace's prank.

In , Roger Patterson and Bob Gimlin made a second film showing an ape-like creature walking around near the same Bluff Creek of the original sighting. Years later, costume manufacturer Philip Morris said he sold Patterson the gorilla suit seen in the film, and introduced a large man who said he tromped around in the costume for the camera. How frequent are sightings? In January, hikers in Provo, Utah, spotted a massive, dark figure moving slowly along a mountainside. Real or not, the country's love affair with the monster is indisputable.

Can this be some legendary sized animal? By the s, pseudo-documentaries were investigating his existence and films were portraying him as a sexual predator. One big example is the movie Harry and the Hendersons , which portrayed Bigfoot as a friendly, misunderstood creature in need of protection from John Lithgow and his family. So why has the Bigfoot legend persisted for 60 years?

Legends of wild humanoid creatures are as old as human history and span the globe. Names and other details vary, but common traits of these undocumented animals are bipedalism, gigantic size, hair-covered bodies, and a potential to cause harm. A Native American tradition in the Pacific Northwest tells of a giant hair-covered ogre named Tsonoqua who steals children and food.

This is likely the origin of the Sasquatch or Bigfoot legend. Bigfoot was popularized in , when news media picked up a story about Ray Wallace, a road contractor working in northern California, who made plaster casts of giant footprints that he found near his worksite. This footprint cast is associated with the most celebrated Bigfoot sighting of modern times.

In Bluff Creek, they sighted a creature strolling through a clearing and they managed to film a short sequence from a reported distance of about 80 feet. The resulting movie is grainy and difficult to interpret, but clearly shows something unlike any animal known to inhabit the region. To some this is incontestable proof that Bigfoot lives among us, but to others it is merely a man or a woman in a gorilla suit.

This handprint cast is a copy of the original made by Ivan Marx. Grover Krantz, a physical anthropologist who studied the anatomy of Bigfoot hand and foot impressions, found many details in this impression that he thought were too difficult to fake. Despite many eyewitness accounts, blurry photos or films, and the many footprints, conclusive physical evidence of the creature itself remains elusive.

Replica casts such as these may now be purchased online, but the fact that these were obtained during the heyday of the Bigfoot phenomenon makes them important historical artifacts regardless of their authenticity. The search for Bigfoot and other undocumented species falls under the quasi-scientific discipline of cryptozoology. Some have suggested the possibility that an extinct giant ape named Gigantopithecus may be the ultimate origin of the legends. Crime witnesses, for example, can be influenced by their emotions and may miss important details in what they are seeing.

In the same vein, people also often overestimate their ability to remember things. When it comes to cryptids like Bigfoot, the human brain is capable of making up explanations for events it can't immediately interpret, and many people simply want to believe they exist, Live Science previously reported. Some people claim to have heard Bigfoot vocalizations , including howls, growls and screams. The creatures are also associated with other noises, such as wood-knocking, according to Scientific American.

Recordings of these noises occasionally attract media attention but can usually be attributed to known animals, such as foxes or coyotes. Related: Real or not? The science behind 12 unusual sightings. Shot in Bluff Creek, it shows a large, dark, human-size and human-shape figure striding through a clearing.

Widely considered a hoax, it remains to this day the best evidence for the existence of Bigfoot. With the rise of high-quality cameras in smartphones, photographs of people, cars, mountains, flowers, sunsets, deer and more have gotten sharper and clearer over the years; Bigfoot is a notable exception.

The logical explanation for this discrepancy is that the creatures don't exist, and that photographs of them are merely hoaxes or misidentifications.

Related: Did hiker film Bigfoot, black bear or 'Blobsquatch'? In his book "Big Footprints" Johnson Books, , veteran researcher Grover Krantz discussed alleged Bigfoot hair, feces, skin scrapings and blood.