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Bigfoot and Our Need to Believe [1]

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Date: 2025-04-30

Editor’s Note: This post is from our data newsletter, the Rural Index, headed by Sarah Melotte, the Daily Yonder’s data reporter. Subscribe to get a weekly map or graph straight to your inbox.

The last time I was at the library, I came across John O’Connor’s The Secret History of Bigfoot: Field Notes on a North American Monster, while looking for another, less fun, book. O’Connor is a Bigfoot skeptic, and he comes at the topic with a journalist’s sense of curiosity. The Secret History of Bigfoot explores the myth and meaning of the notorious monster and the people who study its mysterious and controversial existence.

Over the last couple of years I’ve been omnivorously consuming content about encounters with strange creatures whose existence scientists can’t prove. I’m writing a book about people who say they’ve seen mountain lions east of the Mississippi River, where they have supposedly been extinct for almost a century. I’m trying to understand the history and social context surrounding these figures.

Whether it’s Bigfoot or mountain lions, I’m not really interested in determining whether the sightings of these creatures are scientifically verifiable. I’m more interested in exploring why mysterious wildlife inspires obsession and fanaticism, and what it says about the American environmental psyche.

Society needs Bigfoot, according to writer Laura Krantz. “Even in our imaginations, we need a landscape that can carry him,” Krantz wrote in an article for High Country News. “In a modern world that is so tamed, so pruned and paved, we are losing something that has long been with us and defined us.”

But the psychological need for a magical wilderness is not just a modern phenomenon. In the late 14th century, Chaucer opened “The Wife of Bath’s Tale” with what I interpret as a nostalgic recalling of the days of King Arthur, when “This land was all filled full of supernatural creatures,” and the elf-queen “Danced very often in many a green mead.” Even Chaucer’s contemporaries regarded the past as a time when the world was less spoiled. Maybe this longing has always been with us, and Bigfoot stories are one of the most popular contemporary manifestations of it.

It should go without saying that I checked out the Bigfoot book. On one of the first pages, O’Connor cites data from the Bigfoot Field Researchers Organization (BFRO), the only self-proclaimed scientific group researching the Bigfoot mystery. BFRO collects Bigfoot sightings and tracks them in an online database that goes as far back as the 1980s.

I gathered all of the sightings that were reported to BFRO between the beginning of 2024 and the present, forming a database of sightings with comments from individuals who had personal encounters with creatures, or who took photos of their tracks.

(I recently learned that the term Bigfoot refers to a species of animal, not necessarily an individual monster. And what, then, would we call a group Bigfoot? A toe? A hairball, perhaps? I digress.)

You should take all of this data with a whopping grain of salt. Like a big ol’ boulder-sized grain of salt. Even if Bigfoot’s existence (is ‘Bigfeet’ plural?) was scientifically proven, self-reported data on sightings wouldn’t be an acceptable way to monitor their whereabouts. This sampling method is prone to all kinds of errors and biases. But because Bigfoot and his cryptid counterparts are beyond the realm of scientific inquiry, it doesn’t matter much to me that the map data is, too.

Between January of 2024 and April 23rd of this year, when I collected this data, there were 37 Bigfoot sightings. About half of those sightings occurred in metropolitan counties and the other half in nonmetropolitan, or rural, counties.

“I went to check my cows Tuesday and just inside my gate, I saw a track made by something heavy enough to leave a clear imprint in gravel mixed soil,” wrote one Texas rancher who submitted a Bigfoot track to the BFRO database.

Near my hometown in rural Newberry County, South Carolina, a deer hunter said he heard a Bigfoot vocalization, which he said sounded like a grunt, while sitting in a deer stand.

“Turned around to look and seen a approx. 7 to 7.5 foot tall brown human like shape through all the brush,” the hunter wrote. “Had long brown hair, ape like face, and long arms.”

Most of the urban sightings weren’t in dense city centers, but in smaller metropolitan areas, like Jackson County, Oregon, a community that borders California. The Jackson County sighting was submitted by a biker who said he heard a Bigfoot knocking on wood while he was camping in Rogue National Forest.

According to a 2022 Civic Science survey, there was a slight uptick in the share of Americans who said they believed in Bigfoot compared to 2020. Civic Science is a consumer research firm that aims to capture public interests, attitudes, and demographics through survey data.

In 2022, Civic Science’s data analysts found that 13% of Americans believed Bigfoot is a living creature, up from 11% in 2020. About 14% of respondents who identified as rural believed in Bigfoot, while 13% of suburban and urban identifying residents were believers in 2022.

I’m referring to rural respondents here as “rural-identifying” because the survey uses a self-reported measure of rurality. This isn’t a consistent method for capturing geographic data, and it’s certainly not how we define rural at the Yonder. But I’m including the figures here because this edition of the Rural Index is just for funsies. I’m cool. I’m laid back, I promise.

It seems to me that the Bigfoot question is strange no matter how you look at it. What is it that people are seeing out there in the damp, old growth forests of the Pacific Northwest, or in the clay-covered foothills of the Appalachian mountains?

One answer is that Bigfoot is real and the BFRO database captures a material phenomenon. The other explanation is that Bigfoot is not real. And although that might seem like the most likely explanation, it also seems like the strangest one. Because that would mean that people all over North America are having collective delusions about a hairy half-man, half-ape creature. And isn’t that fun to ponder?



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