Bigfoot: How Sasquatch became an american icon
Happy National Bigfoot Day! Fifty-nine years ago today, on October 20, 1967, Roger Patterson and Bob Gimlin filmed what became the most famous footage of an alleged Sasquatch ever recorded. Bigfoot enthusiasts began promoting the anniversary as National Sasquatch Awareness Day around 2009. While unofficial, it has become an annual excuse to celebrate the big guy.
Fittingly, today also marks the U.S. release of Capturing Bigfoot, a new documentary from director Marq Evans that premiered at South by Southwest in March. Opening in select cities and on Prime Video on Bigfoot Day, it promises previously unseen 16mm footage that its filmmakers say sheds new light on how the famous 1967 film came to be. Nearly sixty years later, a few seconds of grainy film are still headlining a feature documentary.
Over the decades Bigfoot stopped being a frightening wilderness mystery and became an American icon. Bigfoot’s footprint is everywhere: on movie screens, television sets, roadside statues, refrigerator magnets, bumper stickers and T-shirts from Maine to Miami and from Montauk to Malibu. Today Bigfoot is probably the most recognizable cryptid on the planet. How did a creature that may not exist become one of the most durable icons in American culture?
The answer begins, as so many American myths do, with a newspaper headline.
The answer begins, as so many American myths do, with a newspaper headline.
The Birth of 'Bigfoot' — 1958
On August 27, 1958, a construction worker named Jerry Crew showed up at the Humboldt Times in Eureka, California, carrying a plaster cast of an enormous footprint — fifteen inches long, with a stride of more than four feet — that he had found near Bluff Creek in the Six Rivers National Forest. Reporter Andrew Genzoli ran the story the next day under a headline that gave the creature its popular name: Bigfoot.
Crew and his coworkers had been finding the prints for weeks. They were frightened enough to consider abandoning the job site. Genzoli's story was picked up by the Associated Press and syndicated across the country. Within days, 'Bigfoot' had entered the American vocabulary. The earlier word, Sasquatch, borrowed from Indigenous tradition by British Columbia schoolteacher J.W. Burns in the 1920s, remained in circulation, but Bigfoot was the name that stuck in the popular imagination (a future newsletter will cover Bigfoot in Indigenous lore).
It would later emerge that the tracks may have been the work of Ray Wallace, a prankster and logging contractor who was present at the site. After Wallace's death in 2002, his family produced large wooden feet they claimed he had used to make fake prints for years. Skeptics declared the Bigfoot legend dead. True believers pointed out that similar tracks had been reported across North America long before 1958, and that Wallace's alleged hoax could not explain all of them.
The Film That Changed Everything — 1967
On October 20, 1967, Roger Patterson and Bob Gimlin were on horseback near Bluff Creek, the same general region where Jerry Crew had found his famous prints, when, by their account, they encountered a large, hair-covered figure walking upright along the edge of a creek bed. Patterson grabbed his 16mm camera and ran after it, filming roughly 59 seconds of footage before the figure disappeared into the trees.
Frame 352 of the Patterson–Gimlin film is one of the most scrutinized pieces of home footage in history (betting that the Zapruder film of the Kennedy assassination is the most scrutinized). It shows a large, dark-furred, apparently female figure — later nicknamed 'Patty' — glancing back over her shoulder at the camera as she walks away. The gait, the proportions, the movement of muscle beneath fur: experts have debated every frame for nearly sixty years. The film’s authenticity remains in dispute.
What the Patterson–Gimlin film unquestionably achieved was making Bigfoot a national obsession. It was broadcast on television, printed in newspapers, and debated in scientific journals. It gave the creature a face, a body, and a way of moving. It made Bigfoot feel real in a way that footprint casts never could. And it launched a cottage industry of investigators, enthusiasts, debunkers, and believers.
Bigfoot Comes to Hollywood
Once Bigfoot had a face, Hollywood wanted it. The creature's first significant screen appearances came in the 1970s, when the phenomenon was at its first great cultural peak. One of the first was the 1972 documentary Bigfoot: Man or Beast? The mid-70s film The Legend of Bigfoot presented itself as a serious investigation. Even The Six Million Dollar Man got into the act with a 1976 two-part episode titled 'The Secret of Bigfoot.' Sasquatch, played by André the Giant, was actually a bionic creation of alien visitors.
The creature's definitive pop-culture moment, however, came in 1987 with Harry and the Hendersons starring John Lithgow. The film, which won the Academy Award for Best Makeup, presented Bigfoot as a gentle, curious, deeply affectionate being who accidentally ends up living with a suburban Seattle family. Harry was not frightening. Harry was sweet, clumsy, and heartbroken when the Hendersons realized they had to return him to the wilderness. While still frightening to some, the film softened the image of Bigfoot for many. Rather than a wild creature, he could be powerful but peaceful, wild but warm, a creature that wants nothing more than to be left alone in his forest.
Television kept pace. Bigfoot appeared or was referenced in dozens of series across the decades — from In Search Of... (hosted by Leonard Nimoy) to The X-Files, from Northern Exposure to The Simpsons. The animated series have been particularly generous: Bigfoot has appeared in everything from Scooby-Doo to South Park to Gravity Falls, each version reflecting the cultural moment — monster, mystery, comic figure, or misunderstood neighbor.
One final note. Given the resemblance of Chewbacca to Bigfoot, could George Lucas’ creation have been influenced by Bigfoot?
From Monster to Mascot: The Merchandise Empire
At some point in the 1970s and 1980s, Bigfoot made a decisive leap from feared cryptid to beloved mascot. Today the Bigfoot merchandise industry is impossible to measure in full. Walk into any gift shop near a national forest in the Pacific Northwest, and the shelves tell the story: Bigfoot T-shirts, Bigfoot coffee mugs, Bigfoot emojis, Bigfoot Christmas ornaments … the list goes on and on.
The collectors’ market adds another dimension. Bigfoot-themed coins, including a five dollar Canadian Maple Leaf coin, have become a small but dedicated niche. The creature's silhouette, instantly recognizable from the Patterson-Gimlin footage, functions as a kind of folk logo, appearing on everything from craft beer labels to professional and college sports mascots. The United States now has numerous museums and museum exhibits devoted to the creature.
The roadside statues deserve a paragraph of their own. Carved from logs by chainsaw artists or forged in iron, these figures appear throughout the Northwest and Appalachia. Most are eight to ten feet tall, arms slightly raised, expression somewhere between friendly and furtive. They have become a form of American roadside folk art.
Perhaps the most successful commercial Bigfoot venture of the modern era, however, is the Jack Link's Beef Jerky campaign 'Messin' with Sasquatch,' which launched in 2006. The ads showed campers provoking a mild-mannered Sasquatch with pranks — replacing his beef jerky with a pinecone, drawing on his face while he slept — and suffering increasingly spectacular consequences. The campaign ran for years, won advertising awards, and cemented the image of Bigfoot as a creature with a sense of humor, however limited its patience. Jack Link's Sasquatch is not terrifying. He is, in his way, deeply relatable.
Reality Television and the Modern Hunt
The twenty-first century brought Bigfoot into the golden age of reality television. Animal Planet's Finding Bigfoot premiered in 2011 and ran for nine seasons without the team ever finding Bigfoot. The show's appeal lay not in resolution but in the search: the night-vision hikes, the wood-knocking calls into the darkness, the eyewitness testimonials, the earnest debates about tree structures and thermal signatures.
Expedition Bigfoot, which premiered on the Travel Channel in 2019, applied a more data-driven approach, using predictive algorithms to identify high-probability search zones. It found potential evidence but, like every expedition before it, not the creature itself. The pursuit continues, which is precisely why it makes good television: Bigfoot, like all great mysteries, is better unsolved.
The internet age brought its own contributions. The BFRO (Bigfoot Field Researchers Organization) maintains a searchable database of thousands of catalogued sightings (which is the subject of a future newsletter). Reddit's r/bigfoot community has hundreds of thousands of members. YouTube hosts thousands of hours of alleged footage, analysis, and commentary. Podcasts devoted to the subject number in the dozens.
Why We Want Bigfoot to Exist
There is something worth examining in the sheer persistence of this phenomenon. Bigfoot has survived repeated debunkings, multiple alleged confessions, and the complete absence of physical remains. He has survived the proliferation of trail cameras and camera phones. He has not only survived but flourished through decades of organized searches and the mapping of virtually every wilderness area in North America. His cultural footprint keeps growing — pun intended.
Bigfoot appeals to our desire for mystery. We live in an age of satellite imagery and GPS tracking. The idea that something large and genuinely unknown might still inhabit the deep forests is both intriguing and cool. While frightening in early reports, Bigfoot has become, culturally, something different: a wild man with dignity, a forest dweller who asks nothing of civilization except to be left alone. In an era of environmental concern and accelerating habitat loss, there is something appealing about a creature that represents pure wilderness. If you’d rather wax philosophical, perhaps we are anthropomorphizing the forest and the unknown. Bigfoot could be a part of us that wishes we’d never left the forest.
Bigfoot in the Atlantis Universe
One of the principal characters in the Atlantis Universe is AkuBrugal — AB for short. AB is a pipe-smoking sasquatch with a hint of a British accent and a dry sense of humor. Think of a cross between Hagrid and Chewbacca. He lives in Deepwood Hold, a cave system hidden within the old-growth forests of the Pacific Northwest.
In the Atlantis Universe, the question of why sasquatches have never been officially discovered has a specific answer: they were genetically engineered by surviving Atlanteans to serve as their caretakers, and they also possess a form of telepathic camouflage. If you spot one, it can make you believe you saw something else — a bear, a tree trunk, a large rock. As for photographic evidence, Atlantean technology can easily overwhelm anything we currently possess.
AB, as a character, reflects the affectionate version of Bigfoot that popular culture developed over the second half of the twentieth century. He is not frightening. He is not a monster. He is something rarer and more interesting: a being of tremendous capability and long memory living quietly at the edge of the world humanity knows, watching with a mixture of amusement and concern. As Charlie’s guardian and quiet mentor, he plays a significant role in the Atlantis Universe. He is, among other things, part philosopher and part comedian. He has his own blog on my website: Words of Wisdom from AB. While writing Legacy of Atlantis, he became my favorite character.
Sources
Humboldt Times (Eureka, CA), August 28, 1958 (original 'Bigfoot' headline); Patterson–Gimlin film, October 20, 1967; 'The Secret of Bigfoot,' The Six Million Dollar Man, ABC, 1976; Harry and the Hendersons, Universal Pictures, 1987; Finding Bigfoot, Animal Planet, 2011–2019; Expedition Bigfoot, Travel Channel, 2019–present; Bigfoot Field Researchers Organization, bfro.net; Willow Creek–China Flat Museum, Willow Creek, CA; Jack Link's 'Messin' with Sasquatch' advertising campaign, 2006–present; Coleman, Loren, Bigfoot! The True Story of Apes in America, Paraview Pocket Books, 2003; Capturing Bigfoot, dir. Marq Evans, XYZ Films, 2026.
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