Bigfoot: King of the Cryptids

He’s the big guy. He’s the king. He’s the cryptid that gets the most press and has the biggest fandom. He’s Bigfoot, and he rules the world of fantastic beasts that might (just might) really exist.

Every continent except Antarctica has a version, in myth and legend and folklore, of a giant primate that walks on two legs and leaves enormous footprints. Unlike the gorilla or the chimpanzee, he’s fully bipedal. He walks upright like a human. But he’s much larger—seven to ten feet tall—and much hairier.

North America’s Bigfoot is also known as the Sasquatch. He’s found in the deep woods from Alaska down into California and across the to the Midwest. In Florida he’s called the Skunk Ape, notorious for his distinctive stench.

Tales of him apparently predate European colonization. A huge hairy creature has lived beyond the edges of the human world for as long, maybe, as humans have inhabited the continent. He may be a remnant, a survivor of a prehistoric species supposed to have gone extinct millions of years ago.

The main candidate for the original Bigfoot is the largest ape that ever lived, Gigantopithecus, which lived in South Asia during the Pleistocene. Gigantopithecus probably most closely resembled the orangutan, but was significantly larger; it most likely was not bipedal, but walked on its forelimbs like an orangutan or a gorilla.

The fossils of no comparable creature have been found in the Americas, but cryptozoologists will point out that that doesn’t mean they don’t exist. They just haven’t been found yet. Rather like Bigfoot himself—which is not for lack of trying.

Gigantopithecus seems to have been a forest dweller, but Asia’s other giant hairy possible-primate is a denizen of the highest mountains in the world. The Yeti, the Abominable Snowman, stalks the Himalayas. As with the Sasquatch, tales of this creature have been told since long before Europeans arrived in that part of the world. Again, is he a remnant or a revenant? Is he a distant memory of an extinct species, or does he still somehow survive in the remote peaks?

In South America, giant hairy primates have appeared in folklore and in news reports from the Amazon to Chile down to Patagonia.

Africa has its own versions, which may be a giant babboon or an early colonizer’s first encounter with a gorilla, but then there’s the “South African Bigfoot.” In Europe, he’s the Wild Man of the Woods, the hairy man-beast who may or may not have been born human. Australia has the Yowie, which goes back long before colonization.

Bigfoot is everywhere. And wherever he’s supposedly been seen, Bigfoot hunters have tried to follow. I’m going to follow some of them, with an occasional excursion into fiction. Nearly all of what I’ve seen has been on film and in television documentaries and reality shows. I haven’t happened across a lot of prose fiction, aside from the odd (sometimes very odd) Bigfoot romance.

My only regret at the moment is that I’m beginning this chapter too early to have seen what looks like an interesting entry in the Bigfoot film canon, a brand-new not-yet-release, Sasquatch Sunset. I may find it necessary to revisit the subject when the film finds it way to a streaming platform.

Meanwhile I’d love to know your favorite examples of Bigfoot on film or in print. What do you consider to be essential to the proper understanding of this most famous of all the cryptids? What should we absolutely not miss? (Including, of course, Harry and the Hendersons.) Do please tell us in the comments.