Sleepy History - Bigfoot

Episode Date: January 11, 2026

For generations, tales of a mysterious, towering creature roaming the forests of North America have stirred curiosity and wonder. But the tales of Bigfoot (or Sasquatch) extend much farther back into history than you may think. From ancient Indigenous lore to modern-day sightings, Bigfoot has remained one of the most enduring mysteries in cryptozoology. Tonight, we'll explore the origins, stories, and cultural fascination surrounding Bigfoot, as the mysteries of this legendary figure gently lead you into a restful sleep. Narrated by: Simon Mattacks Written by: Alicia Steffann Includes mentions of: Myths & Legends, Cryptozoology, Fantastical Creatures #history #sleep #bedtime #story #bigfoot #sasquatch #mystery About Sleepy History  Explore history's most intriguing stories, people, places, events, and mysteries, delivered in a supremely calming atmosphere. If you struggle to fall asleep and you have a curious mind, Sleepy History is the perfect bedtime companion. Our stories will gently grasp your attention, pulling your mind away from any racing thoughts, making room for the soothing music and calming narration to guide you into a peaceful sleep.  Want to enjoy Sleepy History ad-free? Start your 7-day free trial of Sleepy History Premium: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://sleepyhistory.supercast.com/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Have feedback or an episode request? Let us know at: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠slumberstudios.com/contact⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Sleepy History is a production of Slumber Studios. To learn more, visit ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠www.slumberstudios.com⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Every year, hundreds of people across North America report encounters with a massive, elusive creature, often in the dead of night, deep in the woods, and far from help. Over 75,000 eyewitness reports claimed to have spotted Bigfoot since just the mid-1990s. Tonight, in our search for Bigfoot, we'll go back thousands of years and all across across the world, from the chilly heights of the Himalayas where the Yeti roamed, to the forests of India, where ancient apes and Western imagination collided. And then to the shores of the Pacific Northwest, where modern Bigfoot Law was born. We'll soon see if the creatures rooted in indigenous law could still exist in the form of the Bigfoot we know today. So just relax.

and let your mind drift as we explore the sleepy history of Bigfoot. In 1967, two men named Roger Patterson and Bob Gimlin set off into the wilderness of Northern California. Their goal was to film a pseudo-documentary about an encounter with the legendary creature, Bigfoot. There is a saying that truth is stranger than fiction. and on that day the two men certainly tested this theory. By their report, they spontaneously came upon an actual, enormous, hairy, ape-like creature alongside Bluff Creek, which is about 38 miles south of the Oregon border. Hastily grabbing his video camera, Patterson reportedly pursued the creature on foot,

shooting a shaky video that ended up being less than a minute long. For the part that is discernible, the film clearly pictures an ape-like figure striding energetically away and looking back angrily at the camera. In his book, The Secret History of Bigfoot, journalist John O'Connor calls the Patterson-Gimlin film the single most infamous and contested piece of Bigfoot evidence in existence. Critics are pointed to a large number of doubts that can be raised about the veracity of the clip. These range from the inconsistencies in the accounts given by the two men to the characteristics of the supposed Bigfoot, which did not physically match known scientific norms, but these criticisms did not appear quickly.

In fact, the film itself didn't attract much serious attention from scientists at all in the beginning, with few agreeing to view it, and even fewer interested in debunking its claims. Nonetheless, Patterson managed to promote it to the public enough that his story took hold. Against the odds, it became a pivotal moment in the history of the search for Bigfoot. O'Connor even goes so far as to say, if not for the Patterson-Gimlin film, chances are Bigfoot would have faded into history's back pages. From the Patersonian stage, however, it trod audaciously into the American vernacular,

embodying in its homespun, gigantism and subversive charm, the myth of America itself. The average modern American might be skeptical at the suggestion that the legend of Bigfoot hinges on a single movie. After all, Bigfoot stories are so widespread in the United States and Canada that even children are aware of them. But O'Connor's words do ring true, if you consider the transition that happened for the mythology of Bigfoot in the late 20th century.

Sometime between the end of the 1950s and the time of Patterson's film, Bigfoot went from being part of rural folklore and indigenous storytelling to being vaulted into the realm of pseudoscience, which was populated by legends like that of Atlantis and the Loch Ness monster, To truly understand the lasting appeal of Bigfoot may be an impossible quest. After all, the elusive creature has roots that predate the United States as a country, and actually hail from across the globe. While the modern Bigfoot of pulp fiction and conspiracy theories is a uniquely American story,

its predecessors in North America and other countries were steeped in important indigenous cultural meaning. People around the world tend to be familiar with some of Bigfoot's most famous counterparts. The Yeti, now often known to English speakers as the Abominable Snowman, is a famous legend from Asia. In Australia, the Yowie reigns supreme. And much more generally, a figure known as the Wildman has spanned cultures starting with ancient Mesopotamia and dispersing across Yawai. Europe throughout the ensuing centuries. The wild man even showed up in stories about Camelot. And of course, nothing is more important in the history of Bigfoot than its indigenous origins

in North America. The First Nations of the West Coast have a long-established folklore about similarly reclusive giant creatures. Notably, the Steylas, who have lived in the Harrison River Valley for a least 10,000 years, provide insights into the origin of a figure they consider to be one of the category of shape-shifting spirits they call the slollicum. That creature, often considered alongside Bigfoot, is often called the Sasquatch. All of these legends from across the world are connected by threads. People who would never meet, who were separated by oceans and sentinel.

centuries, somehow created stories and mythologies with common themes. The North American Bigfoot of today carries traits of these far-flung cousins, while having also become, in many ways, its own phenomenon. Before we explore how that happened, let's take a little trip across the globe to consider those predecessors. It's impossible to figure out which culture had the first Bigfoot-like creature. but we know that many of these figures were born into indigenous folklore. In recent centuries, most of them seemed to have been magnified and changed

when they were adopted by colonizers and foreign travelers to their native locations. This trend of hyping up local stories was because of the surge of interest in what is called cryptozoology. The Oxford English Dictionary describes cryptozoology. zoology as the study of unknown, legendary, or extinct animals whose existence or survival to the present day is disputed or unsubstantiated. And those creatures are called cryptids. Understanding how this trend appeared is important to the story of the rise of Bigfoot-type creatures in the modern day. The Yeti, for example, was a legend treated with great reverence for centuries by the people who traversed the Himalayas.

In its oldest form, the original Yeti seems to have been considered a sort of protective nature spirit, living in the glaciers. But the idea that it was an actual creature evolved early enough that Alexander the Great reportedly demanded to see one, and he invaded the Indian subcontinent in 326 BCE. As the story goes, the local people refused to help him, insisting that the beasts, if captured, would not survive at low altitudes. According to a cryptid encyclopedia called the Bigfoot Book, the Leptcher people of northeast India have also long told of Goliath-sized hairy humanoids that lived high in the Himalayas.

Eventually growing, the story of the Yeti appears to have spread throughout neighboring regions, as part of Buddhist mythology for many years. Due to the belief that seeing one would be bad luck, few people went looking for a Yeti for a very long time. But in the early 1800s, European outsiders came on mountain clinton. expeditions and reported a sighting. Then, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, reports of folklore, footprints, and sightings by explorers such as Lawrence Waddell and the members of the Everest reconnaissance expedition kicked off a frenzy. It wasn't long

before someone had written a news story giving the Yeti a catchy new name. The Abominable Snowman, Also, consider the Australian Yowie, which developed from Aboriginal legend. A 1987 Australian tabloid article reported that the first sighting of the mythical beast had been in 1795. Further, a journal article from 1842 referred to a hideous monster of an unearthly character and ape-like appearance. The author of the article called it a, Yahoo Devil as a figure of indigenous folklore. The origin of the generic name Yowie is unclear,

but the Aboriginal people had many other names for these reclusive, hairy creatures, such as Quinkin and Jugabina. These Yauis were sometimes depicted as being shy, and other times aggressive. Similarly to the story of the Yeti, reported sightings began a few years after written coverage began. And soon, the Yowie was being mentioned in other articles and in literature. The legend grew from there. There is also a long history of people simply documenting various wild, hairy characters without the benefit of any local folklore. These can be grouped together as a figure we'll just call the wild man. That may sound like quite a general description, but it's a phenomenon that can be traced almost as far back as the written word.

The idea of the wild man encompasses figures ranging from unkempt hermits to apes to monsters. Perhaps the oldest written record of a wild man is the figure of Enkidu, who appears as a lone wanderer and a figure of nature in the ancient Mesopotamian epic of Gilgames. written during the second millennium BCE. In the 5th century BCE, Herodotus described ancient wild men who could be found in Western Libya. This made him the first historian to take part in the Wild Man mythology. During that same century, a classical Greek physician named Jesus

wrote a book called Indica. In it, he documented stories that Silk Road Traders had brought him. about the far-away Indian subcontinent. Even though his book included dubious concepts, such as unicorns and dogs the size of lions, his stories of wild men in India proved to be compelling for readers. More importantly, his book was a step in establishing the idea that wild men were thriving in what he considered to be uncivilized, exotic places.

We should note here that historical rurface. writings about the wild man are often marred by problematic and prejudiced notions of civilization, as defined by colonizers, invaders, explorers, or people otherwise unfamiliar with the areas they were writing about. In the second century BCE, there is another early example of a wild man found in literature, that of Nebuchadnezzar the second in the book of Daniel. In the story, God humbled the Babylonian king for his sins, striking him mad and alienating him from human society. Once that happened, he grew hair on his body and lived like a beast. It seems very possible that early writers, newly exposed to certain regions of the world, were also documenting

animals we now know as apes. The Carthaginian explorer, Hano the Navigator, who lived during the 5th century BCE, reported encountering a race of hair-covered men and women in what may have been modern-day Sierra Leone. He called them the guerrilli, thus establishing the name that would eventually be used to describe modern guerrillas. Clinney, the elder, who managed to write about a massive range of topics during his lifetime in the first century CE, also left behind musings on wild men in his book called Natural History. This 37-volume work is considered by some historians to be the first encyclopedia. In it, he wrote about the existence of fur-coated, fanged creatures in India who resembled humans but could not speak. It's possible he was actually

describing what we now know as Gibbons. Europeans would have been awed by these foreign animals, automatically attaching their strangeness to places that Westerners naively considered less civilized. It's not surprising then that the wild man began showing up in art and literature in medieval Europe. Although depictions of wild men and women varied, their most basic quality was that they were the opposite of what Europeans

considered to be civilized. Examples of wild men started appearing in European mythology hundreds of years after Pliny the Elder wrote about them. For example, the Celts in the 9th century CE told of a pagan king named Sweeney who was cursed with madness after assaulting a Christian bishop. He wandered the wilderness, eventually perishing there. Welsh poets spoke of a figure named Merton Wilt, who suffered a similar fate. But there was a twist. When he fled to his wildlife in the forest, he also got the gift of prophecy. This is an early example of how Europeans sometimes came to revere and romanticize wild men, investing them with a sort of primitive wisdom. To modern listeners, this character of Merton is especially interesting,

because he was later recast as Merlin by 12th century Camelot author Geoffrey of Monmouth. Scottish folklorists also point to parallels between Merthin and a 6th century wild man of their own named Lilochen. He was also considered a prophet. Like Merthin, the wilderness brought him madness as well as a gift. The Slavic people had their own variety of wild men and women who were generally called Devi. They were described in a range of ways.

Different Devi had different motivations. However, in general, they were often dangerous to people and could not communicate with words. In many ways, they were more like forest spirits than people. By the mid-15th century, we can find European art that depicted the wild men, including engravings, tapestries, and even stained glass. Also, attesting to the sometimes oddly admiring views people held of wild men,

such images appeared in a variety of crests and coats of arms. And even with all this background, there are countless other examples of similar creatures who populated the wilderness and imagination of other countries that haven't been covered. But it is enough, perhaps, to simply show how the myth of these hairy reclusive beasts seems to be a common human experience. While tales of the Yeti and the Yowie and the Wildman were populating other parts of the world,

the indigenous people of North America were coexisting with their own hairy spirits and creatures. Janet and Colin Baud took on an intimidating task in 1982 when they published The Bigfoot Casebook, In it, they attempted to catalogue all the Bigfoot eyewitness sightings in the United States chronologically, instead of focusing on a particular area or clusters of reports. To those of us who are used to thinking of Bigfoot as a cryptid found only in the Pacific Northwest and British Columbia, the results are eye-opening. Although this is not what modern Bigfoot enthusiasts might expect, The first sightings in the book were in the early 1800s, in Maine, New York, Arkansas, Pennsylvania, Indiana, and Oklahoma, respectively.

In the entire updated casebook, the only states with zero sightings of a Bigfoot are Delaware, Rhode Island, and South Carolina. In 1850, after these other low-profile incidents mentioned by the casebook, something big happened at Mount Shasta in California. Gold prospectors there began to report that hairy giants were attacking their cabins and equipment. A man named John Weeks later related his father's stories of the time saying, These monsters had long arms but short legs. One of them picked up a 20-foot section of a sluiceway and smashed it to bits against a tree. Another famous tale of the era was recorded by President Theodore Roosevelt himself.

In his book, Wilderness Hunter, he related the story of a hunter with the last name of Bauman. This fellow claimed he and another trapper were in the mountains near the Wisdom River on the border between Idaho and Montana. While they were busy elsewhere, something destroyed their camp and went through their possessions, leaving tracks that clearly showed the intruder walking on two legs.

The story continued with more break-ins and harassments and ended with the untimely passing of Bauman's friend, whom he found surrounded by the creature's tracks. What's interesting about these early accounts, is that they fit with some of the indigenous beliefs about the Sasquatch, namely that the creature is a protector of nature. The theme of fighting back against invading white men and their camps and equipment suggests that these reclusive creatures were guarding their habitat.

While their behavior may have seemed aggressive to the miners and hunters, from an indigenous perspective, it would have fit with the desire of the Sasquatch to take care, care of its lands. Of course, not all of the indigenous cousins of the Sasquatch had the same motivations. The Algonquin believed in a malevolent creature called the Wendigo, which was to be greatly feared. The Kwakowakowak, people of British Columbia, told stories about a creature called the Bakwos that enticed unsuspecting travelers into the shadows by offering them dried salmon. Across the continent, the Abanaki and Penopscot tribes told of the Gichi Awas,

which was more like a fierce, hairless bear than a man. The online Oregon Encyclopedia cites even more examples of a Sasquatch-like figure in indigenous North American law. According to tales recorded by Clara Pearson, who was a Tillamook survivor and speaker of the Nahalem language, tribes in coastal Oregon belated such a figure to ancient stories of wild men who appeared near villages and left tracks. The members of plateau tribes in the area from the rocky mountains to the Pacific coastal mountains identified their wild men figures as a general group of hostile beings. These figures were believed to steal salmon or lead people astray by whistling.

According to the encyclopedia, sightings and stories continue on reservations today. There are so many possible folk tales and stories we could discuss. From this point, however, our story will turn back to the Sasquatch of the Northwest, because it seems to be the clearest predecessor we can find for the particularly North American Bigfoot we know in the modern world. Although the term Bigfoot didn't appear until the mid-20th century, a major development in Bigfoot mythology can be traced back to 1924. In what became known as the Ape Canyon incident,

five gold miners on Mount St. Helens in Washington State reported being attacked by numerous, upright, hairy creatures of enormous size. Reportedly, as much as 400 pounds, although that size seems to have increased suspiciously with the eyewitness retellings. One of the miners whose name was Fred Beck eventually published his story for posterity in 1967, and it remains one of the most notorious of the Bigfoot accounts. According to his tale, he spotted one of the beasts near their cabin and shot at it as it ran away. But later that night, he claimed that the miners were all.

awakened by objects being thrown against their cabin walls. The attack on the cabin was so extreme that the men resorted to barring the door and firing their rifles through the roof, to no avail. In the morning, he reported a final sighting of one of the supposed ape men, whom he claimed was shot and then toppled into the gorge below, never to be found. this, Beck said, they all packed up hastily and went home. Once there, he told his story to other people. This, he claimed, is what set off the ensuing furor among the public. In his account, he wrote, local reporters interviewed us. They came from Portland and Seattle. Even a big game

hunter from England came asking questions. Many people flocked to the Mount St. Helen's area looking for the Great Hairy Apes or Mountain Devils. I myself went back with two reporters and a detective from Portland, Oregon. We found large tracks and they photographed them. We did not see any of the ape men then, nor could we find the ones we had shot. There are a few elements of Beck's story that became commonplace in future Bigfoot law. First, it's notable that the men fired guns. guns at the creatures ineffectually for quite some time.

In later accounts, they were seen as being largely impervious to gunfire, which admittedly strains belief. The other element that became very familiar was that of investigators finding tracks and nothing else. Despite Beck's story about the guns and about the plunge into the gorge, not a trace of an actual Bigfoot was found. It happens that the very same year, a man named Albert Ostman later claimed to have literally been kidnapped by a Bigfoot and held captive with its family for days. According to his story, which he didn't tell until 1957, he had been camping at Tober Inlet in British Columbia when a Bigfoot snatched him, trapping him in his sleeping bag and hauled him some distance. Once they stopped moving, Ostman wiggled out of his sleeping bag to find himself with what he described as a family of big feet,

assisting of a male, a female, a boy and a girl. Ostman said he subsisted on coffee and cold food for a few days, observing their way of life. Eventually he escaped and found his way back to civilization. Those who knew Ostman claimed he was not alive. and the few people who interviewed him, including primate specialists, never caught him in an inconsistency or a falsehood. So while his story sounded quite incredible, nobody has been able to disprove it. From that point onward, the Bigfoot casebook documents a few eyewitness sightings of Sasquatch-like creatures each year, covering much of the United States.

Then, in 1958, Sasquatch Law took a turn when a man named Jerry Crew found huge footprints on a road that was being cleared for logging in Bluff Creek, California. Apparently, other men at the site had seen tracks too. The story exploded on the scene when the Associated Press picked it up. The on-site construction crew referred to the mysterious maker of the prince as Bigfoot. and history was made. Although the prince themselves did not attract scientific interest, the name Bigfoot persisted. And if you'll recall from the beginning of our story,

it was in this spot that Patterson and Gimlin supposedly captured Bigfoot on film just a decade later. Years after the sightings of those infamous footprints, the children of a man named Ray Wallace revealed that their father had made the tracks with big wooden feet as a joke. According to an interview with the New York Times, his son Michael said, this wasn't a well-planned plot or anything.

It's weird because it was just a joke, and then it took on such a life of its own, but even now, we can't stop it. Whatever Wallace's intentions, what his son said rings true. Looking back, 1958 was a decisive moment in the history of the North American legend. The modern Bigfoot mania had commenced.

According to the Oregon Encyclopedia, after the media coverage of those Bluff Creek tracks in 1958, reports continued to increase, and Bigfoot entered the occupational culture of loggers. In the 1870s, a former Yeti hunter named Peter Byrne established the Bigfoot Information Center, garnering plenty of media attention. Byrne was a firm believer in the Patterson-Gimlin film from a few years earlier.

In 1976, he actually collected some hairs from the site of two recent Bigfoot sightings and sent them to the FBI for analysis. The timing of this bold move is not surprising in the context of the 1970s, which were a decade rife with popular conspiracy theories about topics such as the Bermuda Triangle, and the lost city of Atlantis. In his introduction to the updated Bigfoot casebook, Cryptozoologist Lauren Coleman refers to the period as one of high strangeness. In this climate of pseudoscience mania,

Bigfoot seemed more intriguing to people than ever. Byrne was at the forefront of the search. Incredibly, the FBI did get back to Peter Byrne about his rogue hairs, despite the fact that they claimed to not be in the business of examining physical evidence. Their pronouncement was that the samples were from a deer. By the late 20th century, Bigfoot was firmly entrenched in pop culture. The Oregon Encyclopedia sums it up nicely, citing, a series of sports mascots, children's entertainments, and cryptozoological reality shows.

adding that it has also been playfully promoted in state legislation and celebrations. Politicians in both Oregon and Washington have proposed bills to protect the creatures from hunters, and hairy humanoids have served as official state mascots, first as Harrison Bigfoot, the Washington's centennial in 1989, and then Seske the Sasquatch for Oregon's Sesquicentennial in 2009. People who remember the 1970s and 1980s may recall Bigfoot appearing on a two-part episode of the series The Six Million Dollar Man, and they may well have seen the movie Harry and the Hendersons, which provided a lovingly comical take on the character.

And writers have also engaged with the legend of Bigfoot in a third. thoughtful manner, considering the spectrum of Bigfoot law that has emerged and how that relates to the original folklore and the environment. So what about those people who are still certain that Bigfoot is out there? According to Guy Harrison, in his book, 50 popular beliefs that people think are true, a 2006 study at Baylor University revealed that 16% of Americans believed Bigfoot either absolutely or probably existed. Further, a 2016 poll revealed that 26% of Canadians held the same views about cryptids in general. As Harrison points out, it's perfectly reasonable to believe in species we have not yet discovered. That's the likely part. He points to a 2011 article

in the journal Trends in Ecology and Evolution that estimated it would cost $263 billion to discover and catalog the entire animal kingdom. To put it another way, only 1.4 million of about 6.8 million species on Earth may be known to science right now. It's entirely likely, therefore, that a person could find a previously unknown animal. But the problem he continues is with the field of cryptozoology, which favours really big animals with lots of myth and folklore attached to them, many of which, by all indications,

would have been long extinct, even in a related form. And even though finding an animal like that may still be possible, you would need to follow scientific protocols to prove its existence. When it comes to Bigfoot, most of what we have hinges on anecdotes. Footprints have repeatedly been faked. Film is rare and highly suspect.

Hairs have been often tested, even in the past few decades, and turned out to be from other animals. Harrison humorously addresses the Patterson-Gimlin film, saying, I see nothing that leads me to believe it couldn't have been a guy in a cheesy ape suit. Apparently, adherents of the movie claim there were no high-quality ape suits available at that time in the 1960s. But at this, Harrison scoffs, citing films of the era such as Planet of the Apes, 2001 Apes, and even the TV show Star Trek. He also interviews a professor emeritus of physical anthropology named Curtis Winker,

who brings more science to the argument. To begin with, he points out that the majority of Bigfoot sightings are at night, although virtually all higher primates are active during the day. Another anthropologist, by the name of Cameron Smith, points out that there would have to be a great many big feet in order to perpetuate the species. Without, he estimates, at least 500, they could not avoid extinction. How then could all of them evade detection for species?

so long. And lastly, although the arguments could go on and on, how is it that we can find fossils of creatures that lived hundreds of thousands of years ago, yet nobody has ever found a Bigfoot fossil? The closest thing scientists can come up with is proof of the Gigantopithecus, which was a nine-foot tall primate in southern China that died out two or three hundred thousand years ago. Why would we have proof of its existence, but not one shred of solid physical evidence of its modern counterparts? In his book, John O'Connor muses about the Achilles heel of pseudoscience and explains it this way. When researchers come up with a hypothesis, they think explains a phenomenon. They also propose its opposite, a null hypothesis, which they then try to disprove.

If they can't disprove the null hypothesis, the hypothesis itself fails. According to the philosopher Carl Popper, this marks a crucial dividing line between science and pseudoscience. To simplify this even further, O'Connor clarifies that real science tries to debunk a theory in order to ultimately prove that it's true, that pseudoscience merely seeks confirmation of a theory, not the holes in it. Without physical evidence after all these years, Bigfoot believers are still driven by confirmations of what they want to believe, such as footprints and questionable movie footage, but they often do not like to hear about the arguments against their ideas. As O'Connor concludes, it's not that

pseudo-scientific theory cannot possibly be true, but it will always be in doubt because it cannot be tested. Our modern North American Bigfoot may not be a theory we can currently prove, but that doesn't mean that the indigenous people haven't known the truth all along. In 2017, the Sasquatch Museum opened in Harrison Hot Springs, British Columbia. In 2022, attendance figures were reported at 20,000 visitors a year. In fact, an expanded visitor center debuted in 2024. Focusing on the indigenous culture of the Staelis people, the museum celebrates the connection to their sacred lands and healing, portrayed with a deep sense of pride and reverence with the Sasquatch. A BBC article about the Sasquatch Museum shares a thought-provoking quote

from Kelsey Charlie, who is a Stuelis band counselor. He says Stuelas tradition holds these creatures can change from their physical form to a rock, tree, or even another animal. Then Charlie relates something his grandfather used to say, characterizing the storied creature as a shapeshifter that can walk in the two realms, spiritual and the physical. meaningfully, he adds, That's why you'll never catch him.

Bigfoot researcher Thomas Steenberg provides a closing thought that perhaps ties together the reverent Stiehler's view with the Bigfoot of modern pop culture. He says, Sasquatch, if it exists, is a symbol that there's still wilderness out there.

We haven't tamed everything. Echoing back through history to the wild man, to the Yeti, to the Yowie, and beyond. This may just be the thread that ties together all of the human fans of the elusive hairy beast. We all harbor the desire for the ongoing existence of the wild.