Bigfoot's '70s Reputation Hinders Serious Research
Six Rivers National Forest, Calif. -- Researchers trying to legitimize the search for Bigfoot have a mortal enemy, more fearsome than any grizzly bear or armed wilderness hermit: the 1970s.Think back to comic books. Monster trucks. Lee Majors in a polyester suit.
Reports of giant hairy bipeds walking across the Pacific Northwest and parts of Canada go back nearly 200 years. American Indians have passed on stories about the man-ape creature for generations.
But Bigfoot's celebrity status is relatively new. That fame peaked during five tacky years from 1975 to 1980, when Bigfoot was as A-list as Burt Reynolds and Sally Field.
"It was a cartoon," said Matt Moneymaker, president of the Bigfoot Field Researchers Organization. "People used to say, 'I saw Bigfoot' like they would say, 'I saw Batman.'"
BFRO members, like others trying to collect evidence of Bigfoot, believe their jobs would be easier if history were a little nicer to the creature.
Interest in Bigfoot renewed when Oregon psychologist Matthew Johnson said he saw it in July during a hike with his family. Since then, the BFRO and Johnson say, people have come forward who had been holding back their stories because they feared ridicule.
The name "Bigfoot" was first used by journalists in 1958, after taxidermist Bob Titmus made plaster cast footprints of creatures rumored to be wandering deep in the Six Rivers National Forest in Northern California.
The most famous sighting came in 1967, when Roger Patterson and Robert Gimlin filmed 24 feet of who-knows- what walking near Bluff Creek in Six Rivers.
While it was debated whether that film is a hoax, journalists took a scientific approach to the claims of Titmus and Patterson and Gimlin.
The change came in the mid- 1970s, when supermarket tabloids made the creature their poster boy, coming out with "I Had Bigfoot's Son!" type stories. The Hollywood marketing machine took over after that.
Among the sightings: Bigfoot fought Majors on TV's "Six Million Dollar Man" during five episodes in 1976 and 1977. He faced "The Incredible Hulk" in 1979, although the end of the show portrayed Bigfoot a hoax. In 1978, the Marvel Comics "X-Men" introduced a Bigfoot-like character called "Sasquatch." And at a Denver car show in 1979, construction contractor Bob Chandler put Bigfoot's name on a jacked-up pickup, creating history's first "monster truck" show.
Moneymaker said the BFRO often hears from people who say they saw a Bigfoot in the 1970s and didn't tell a soul for 20 years. "To be branded crazy and a liar -- that's something really hard to live with in a small town," Moneymaker said. "So they keep it secret."
Over the past two decades, Bigfoot believers with theories grounded in science have been getting air time. Leonard Nimoy went "In Search Of . . ." Bigfoot in a popular episode of that 1980s television series. An A&E cable network documentary came out in 1994, taking a serious look into the myth, focusing on Peter Byrne, whose Bigfoot Research Project was financed for a while by a group that supports scientific study outside the mainstream.
Most recently, the Internet has made it easy for Bigfoot believers to share stories. On dozens of sites, sightings and theories are exchanged in complete anonymity.
Some are far-out merchandise-oriented groups, but most seem at least partly grounded in research. The largest group appears to be the BFRO, which has an on-line list of reports from every state except Connecticut, Delaware, Rhode Island and Hawaii.
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San Francisco Examiner / CA | By Peter Hartlaub - August 8 2000
