Why bigfoot doesnt exist

That same year, another man named Ray Wallace also said he had discovered large prints belonging to Bigfoot. Upon his death in , it was revealed that this was a hoax. It was in the mid 20th century when Bigfoot stepped from local lore to national phenomenon.

In , naturalist Ivan T. Gimlin says it happened so fast that he considers himself and Roger Patterson pretty lucky that they were able to get any footage at all of the hairy, mythical animal lumbering along only yards away from them.

When he watched the footage for the first time a few days later, Gimlin was pretty pessimistic that this would be enough to convince anyone. Yet, it became a phenomenon. Some, like former director of the primate biology program at the Smithsonian Institution John Napier , saw it as a well-done, elaborate hoax.

But not everyone saw it that way, including Grover Krantz. It was the dermal ridges, where sweat pores open on palms and soles, depicted in the prints that left him convinced that at least some were authentic. His working theory was that Sasquatch was part of the hominid family, the same one humans shared with apes, and was a descendant of thought-to-be-long-extinct humongous primate species that once lived in Asia appropriately named Gigantopithecus. At some point, million of years ago, it had crossed the Bering Strait when it was still a land bridge into North America and evolved into its own species on this continent.

So, Krantz was known to spend his nights in the middle of the Pacific Northwest old growth forests with a shotgun quite literally hunting Bigfoot. Krantz died in as a complex figure in the eyes of the scientific community, highly respected for his work in primate evolution yet mocked for his belief in Bigfoot.

More sightings, films, and books, some from respected researchers , emerged. Harry lived with the Hendersons and entertained the masses. That was my cousin. Type keyword s to search. Soon, we may never need to leave the house, let alone the city. Bigfoot — that tether to a primitive state — is a reminder that the world is big and wide and wild.

In fact, cryptozoology the study of animals whose existence is unproven shares a common goal with its vaunted academic cousins: conservation. To search for Bigfoot is to identify and protect biodiversity and habitat. You have to prove they exist before you can save their habitat. A member guided me deep into the rhododendrons and spruce, well off the beaten path, and halfway down a steep ravine, so I could see the nests with my own eyes.

I expected a pile of debris, something that resembled the mess left behind by spring runoff or a pounding storm. And there were many of them — 21 in this area, although I only saw a handful.

The idea energized me; it felt electrifying and full of potential. What if, for all these centuries, people had been seeing this creature out in the forest? What if it really did exist, right under our noses? What would this mean? Bigfoot enthusiasts are, at heart, naturalists.

They love being out in the woods, they love the environment, they love nature and everything that goes along with it. Like fishermen and hunters many Bigfooters are both , they are keen to protect wilderness — a place where the unexplained still happens. In October , at a Bigfoot conference celebrating the 50th anniversary of the Patterson-Gimlin film the famous minute-long clip allegedly showing a Bigfoot walking away through the woods , I met John Mionczynski, a longtime wildlife biologist who had worked both federal and state agencies.

Decades ago, as he was doing a wildlife survey in the Wind River Mountains of Wyoming, he had a hair-raising encounter. One night, he awoke to the sound of heavy breathing and the shadow of what resembled a bear on the wall of his tent.

The creature poked its nose into the side of his tent; Mionczynski tried to scare it off by yelping and hitting it. It ran off, but came back a second time, and then a third. Mionczynski thought the bear had grabbed onto the branch of the lodgepole pine that stuck out over his tent. So he hit it again. And this time he hit something hard as a rock. Bears don't have that kind of a paw. And it was bigger than a bear's paw and it didn't have claws, it had fingers, with an opposed thumb.

Mionczynski lived to tell the tale, but the encounter has puzzled him ever since; despite all his professional and scientific training, it eluded any explanation he could come up with.

Over two years, I spoke with dozens of people like him, like me — rational, logical people who subscribe to the laws of physics and biology, who have experienced something beyond their understanding, and just have to figure it out.

As yet, Bigfoot intimates Kraken , Wendigo , Yeti and The Loch Ness Monster have issued no statement and have not returned calls or e-mails requesting comments. Write to Jeffrey Kluger at jeffrey. Juuuuust in case By Jeffrey Kluger. Still the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence either. But the saola did not have legions of amateurs hunting it with cameras. With or without hard evidence, many people clearly want to believe in Bigfoot. Which suggests we are dealing more with human imagination than human evolution.

As so-called wild men, they hold a crude mirror up to our own species: What might Homo sapiens be like if civilization had not removed it from nature? Can you tell the real animals from the fake ones? Hover over each animal to reveal if it is fact or folklore.

Illustration by Iris Gottlieb. Some people see these cryptohominids as symbols of pure freedom, living by instinct and foiling every effort to pin them down. To search for Bigfoot in the forest is to taste that freedom.