Case files — Bigfoot / sasquatch (North America)

Scope note, and why this file breaks the pack's own rule. 01-methodology.md weights this pack against the United States on the grounds that the US already has a very large English-language literature of its own. This file is the deliberate exception, and the exception is not a concession to popularity. Bigfoot is the only cryptid here whose record is institutional in three separate registers at once — statute (Washington counties, 1969–1992), federal forensics (the FBI hair examination, 1976–77), and a documented hoax economy that its own investigators wrote down. It is also the only one with a dated fossil candidate that a peer-reviewed journal has now delimited.

Canada carries the non-US weight this pack normally insists on: the word sasquatch is Canadian, and the only legal answer found on it in Canada is provincial and negative (2).

Compiled 25 September 2026. Everything here is sourced to sources.md; nothing here asserts that the animal exists. Where a test exists, the result is printed in the section that reports the claim.

1. Ape Canyon, Washington (1924) and Bluff Creek, California (1958) — the two founding events

Rating: D (the 1924 episode was checked and dismissed within weeks; the 1958 tracks are admitted by the family of the man who is by most accounts behind them) · Status: the word is the road crew's, made famous by a newsroom

1a. Ape Canyon, Mount St. Helens, Washington — summer 1924

Reported: a party of gold prospectors said ape-like animals about 7 ft tall attacked them with boulders near a gorge on the southeast shoulder of Mount St. Helens, that one of them shot and wounded one animal which fell into the canyon, and that the creatures returned that night to bombard their cabin with stones, leaving traces and giant footprints. Fred Beck, one of the party, later published it as I Fought the Apemen of Mt. St. Helens, and the site has been called Ape Canyon ever since.
The official check, on the record: US Forest Service rangers J. H. Huffman and William Welch investigated. They descended into the "inaccessible canyon" and found nothing; they demonstrated that the 14-inch footprints near the cabin could easily be faked; and they concluded the miners had most likely placed the large stones near the cabin themselves. A local game warden called the story "bunk" and a search party found no evidence of any animal.
The mundane candidate on file: rocks thrown down a slope by teenagers from a nearby YMCA summer camp, where throwing stones downhill was reportedly a tradition of its own.
Why it is in this file: it is the template. A claim, a sensational press run, a federal check within weeks, nothing found — and then a seventy-year afterlife, because the story never needed the animal. 07-land-register.md records the same shape at Honey Island (no print reference before 1974) and Momo (1972).
Sources: sources.md → Wikipedia index (Ape Canyon, citing Douglas Perry, The Oregonian, 26 January 2018 — Tier B, primary press cited); Museum of Hoaxes (Tier D, for the game warden's "bunk" verdict, the search party and the YMCA detail).

1b. Bluff Creek Road, Six Rivers National Forest, California — 27 August 1958

What happened: Jerry Crew, a bulldozer operator ("catskinner") for Wallace Construction, found large tracks set deeply into graded dirt around his machine on Bluff Creek Road, a timber access route being cut through old-growth Douglas fir. He measured them at roughly 16 inches long and 7 inches wide. Thirty men worked that road; bear and occasional mountain lion were present.
The context that matters more than the prints: the crew had a run of unexplained incidents on the same road — a missing 50-gallon oil drum, a 700 lb spare tyre thrown into a gully, 100 lb steel cables dragged uphill overnight. Crew's foreman was Wilbur "Shorty" Wallace; co-owner of the company was his brother Ray Wallace, locally known as a prankster, and locals assumed he was behind the tracks at the time.
Where the word comes from: Humboldt Times columnist Andrew Genzoli wrote it up on the front page on 6 October 1958 and shortened the crews' phrase "Big Foot" to one word. The wire services carried it — the New York Times and Los Angeles Times among them — and it entered the language. Weeks later the NBC quiz show Truth or Consequences offered $1,000 to anyone who could explain how the tracks were made.
What the county thought at the time: a "big-footed Swede" (many lumberjacks were of Swedish descent), or Omah, a giant of Hoopa oral tradition. The name was the road crew's; a newsroom made it one word and carried it nationally. It did not come from a tribe.
The family admission: Wallace died on 26 November 2002. His son Michael told the Seattle Times: "Ray L. Wallace was Bigfoot. The reality is, Bigfoot just died." The family produced 16-inch carved wooden feet they said he strapped to his boots, and said his brother Wilbur and nephew Mack McKinley had used them around northern California as a prank. Ray had also, by the family's account, manufactured "evidence" for researchers to find — hair processed from the bison on his animal farm near Toledo, Washington, and stool samples.
The dissenting reading, also on file: Jeff Meldrum (Idaho State University) argues that the crudely carved wooden feet do not match the plaster casts of Crew's prints or the other Bluff Creek tracks — "to suggest all these are explained by simple carved feet strapped to boots just doesn't wash" — and calls the confession Wallace's greatest posthumous hoax. Ed Schillinger, described as the only living witness from the Bluff Creek job, disputes the family's account. Wallace's own behaviour in the interim is part of the file: he denied the tracks were his, threatened to sue his accusers for slander, said the prints were bear, and later claimed to have a young Bigfoot he was feeding breakfast cereal. The sources disagree on the offer: Mental Floss has him selling it for $1,000,000, the Seattle Times has his press release offering $1,000,000 to buy one. No creature was produced either way.
Leading conventional explanation: the founding tracks are a manufactured artefact by the family's admission; the word is a headline; and the later, larger body of reports is a mix of bears, human feet on soft ground, and other people's pranks. What this explanation does not cover is the specific casts Meldrum cites, which is why the case is marked "explained" for the 1958 events rather than for the whole literature.
Sources: sources.md → Mental Floss, "The Hoax That Led to the Word 'Bigfoot'" (Tier C); Seattle Times obituary, 5 December 2002 (Tier C); Los Angeles Times, 6 December 2002 (Tier C); Wikipedia index (Raymond L. Wallace — Tier B).

2. Chehalis / Harrison River, British Columbia, Canada — 1929 — the word sasquatch

Rating: B (documented: a published magazine article and a scholarly reading of it) · Status: the name is an anglicisation; the beings it flattens are not one animal

The origin, precisely: J. W. Burns, a teacher employed on the Chehalis (Sts'ailes) reserve in the 1920s and 1930s, published "Introducing B.C.'s Hairy Giants: A collection of strange tales about British Columbia's wild men as told by those who say they have seen them" in Maclean's Magazine on 1 April 1929. The name is an anglicisation of the Salish se'sxac, "wild man" — and it was Burns's word for his settler readership, not the community's word for a species.
What the article actually contains: Burns retells encounters gathered from Indigenous people, including an account he attributes to "Peter Williams" — pursued by a being that he first took for a huge crouched bear until it stood up and yelled, "a man — a giant, no less than six and one-half feet in height, and covered with hair". Burns frames the narrator for his audience as "a reliable as well as an intelligent Indian". When Williams recounted it to village elders, they listened and, by Burns's own description, "for some reason not quite clear seemed not to wish the story to gain further publicity." The article was published against that wish, and this is the documented point of contact between the traditions and the genre.
The category problem, stated plainly: in Salish and other Indigenous contexts the se'sxac sat closer to a person than to an animal. It is a relational being with rules attached, not a zoological entry with a range. Turning it into "a species of large bipedal ape distributed across the Pacific Northwest" is a translation event — the same flattening this pack records for the bunyip's nine regional variants and the yowie's dozens of names.
The one legal answer found in Canada, and it is negative: Courthouse Libraries BC searched for any reference to a sasquatch (by any name) in BC statute and found none. What it did find is a newspaper retelling — quoted from John Green's Best of Sasquatch Bigfoot, originally in the Colonist — in which a letter-writer asked the Nanaimo government agent Marshall Bray for permission to shoot the "wild man of Horne Lake", and the paper reported that Bray had answered that "it is unlawful to shoot Mowglies within the province of British Columbia at any time." The library notes that it is unclear what Bray's actual written response was, and what law he might have meant is unknown; this file repeats that caution rather than the anecdote.
Sources: sources.md → NiCHE (Network in Canadian History and Environment), Clare O'Reilly, "A Bear — A Man — A Giant", 17 October 2022, quoting Burns, Maclean's, 1 April 1929 (Tier B, with authoritative quotations); Courthouse Libraries BC, "Sasquatch in BC Law" (rev. 9 May 2024) (Tier B).

3. Skamania County, Washington — 1969 and 1984; Whatcom County — 1992 — the ordinance

Rating: B (documented: ordinances and a resolution, with a publication affidavit) · Status: the paperwork is real; the animal is not — and the law says why it was made

The first law: on 1 April 1969 the Board of Commissioners of Skamania County adopted Ordinance No. 69-01, for the protection of sasquatch/bigfoot creatures. Because the date invited disbelief, it was published in the local weekly, the Skamania County Pioneer, on 4 and 11 April 1969, and the publisher then had the article notarised on 12 April 1969 and printed the ordinance with an Affidavit of Publication. An April Fool's date, carried by an affidavit — the same procedural reflex as Sweden's 1986 order for Storsjöodjuret (01-methodology.md; case CR-0001).
The amendment that says the quiet part: the ordinance was repealed in part and amended by Ordinance No. 1984-02, effective 2 April 1984, which declared the animal an endangered species and created a "Sasquatch Refuge", on the basis that "legend, purported recent findings, and spoor" supported its existence in the area.
The neighbouring county followed: Whatcom County Resolution No. 92-043, effective June 1992, declares that county a sasquatch protection and refuge area.
Why the laws were passed — the part usually left out: as Courthouse Libraries BC records, the point was protecting people and travellers in those areas, because a sighting had been proven to draw well-armed investigators and casual hunters who came to take a specimen. This is a public-safety measure wearing a monster's coat: the county legislated about the sighting, not the animal.
The ratios to keep in view: Skamania County sits in the state with the largest volume of reports in the world's largest public database (Washington: 734 listings, more than any other state; 10), and its bigfoot law has outlived every investigation of the animal by decades.
Sources: sources.md → Courthouse Libraries BC, "Sasquatch in BC Law" (Tier B, citing Ordinance 69-01, Ordinance 1984-02, Resolution 92-043 and the county disposition tables); The Columbian, 1 March 2015 (Ordinance 1984-2 text) (Tier C); UMass ScholarWorks, "Sasquatch and the Law" (Tier B).

4. Bossburg, Stevens County, Washington — 24 November 1969 → 1970 — Cripplefoot, and the market it created

Rating: C (reported) with a documented hoax layer around it · Status: the best casts in the corpus, found by a man who then tried to sell a film of the same animal

The find: on 24 November 1969 large human-like tracks with a crippled-looking right foot were found in snow near the town dump at Bossburg, on the east bank of the Columbia River just south of the Canadian border. René Dahinden arrived on 27 November, by which time sightseers had trampled most of them; he photographed and cast the best surviving print. On 13 December 1969 Dahinden and Bossburg resident Ivan Marx found 1,089 tracks in snow leading to, from and across a river near Lake Roosevelt. Grover Krantz then joined, taking photographs and casts; Roger Patterson and Dennis Jenson were there full-time on and off. Casts and photographs were studied later by the primatologist John Napier and by Jeff Meldrum.
Why these casts still matter: Krantz's argument was dermatoglyphic — the Cripplefoot material reportedly showed fine dermal ridge detail he judged too fine to have been carved, plus anatomical features consistent with a healed injury. He wrote that the casts convinced him. Napier and Meldrum are also on record as finding the tracks credible.
The doubt that was contemporaneous, not retrospective: Dahinden himself was suspicious of the circumstances of the find. As he and a passenger drove, Marx pulled over, walked off, returned and said they had to leave at once to fetch his camera equipment because he had just found tracks — and this happened just after they had passed an empty Jeep parked at the roadside, whose occupants Dahinden thought might have been returning from making them. The Jeep was gone when they came back. Dahinden nonetheless accepted the tracks.
What happened next is the real finding. In January 1970, prospector Joe Metlow told the researchers gathered in Bossburg that he had a Bigfoot immobilised in an abandoned mine shaft, and that he had already sold it. A bidding war followed; bids reached $55,000, which called his bluff, and interest collapsed. Metlow then claimed a sasquatch foot in his freezer and started a second bidding war, was evasive, changed his story and ducked the viewing trip — at which point the researchers concluded they had been had.
Nine months later: in October 1970 Ivan Marx telephoned Dahinden — "I've got a film of the cripple Bigfoot." Viewers were described as convinced, and rights bidding began again. Peter Byrne noticed that some local children kept saying they knew where it had been shot; at the location the terrain was inconsistent with Marx's account of the filming and the subject's height. Further red flags followed and belief in the film evaporated. Byrne wrote it up in detail; so did Michael McLeod.
Leading conventional explanation: an unattributed track line of unknown authorship in snow beside a road, then a competition to monetise it. Whatever the Cripplefoot casts are, the case that grew around them is documented as partly manufactured.
Sources: sources.md → Wikipedia index (Bossburg, Washington, citing Hunter & Dahinden; Regal 2008, "Amateur versus professional: the search for Bigfoot") (Tier B); Byrne's account and McLeod, Anatomy of a Beast (Univ. of California Press, 2009) (Tier B).

5. Skookum Meadows, Gifford Pinchot National Forest, Washington — 22 September 2000 — the body cast

Rating: D — the artefact was examined and the best-supported reading is an elk · Status: explained, and explained by the animal whose tracks were all over the site

What was taken: on 22 September 2000, during a BFRO expedition filmed for the television series Animal X, researchers left fruit in a muddy wallow in the Skookum Meadows area overnight and found a partial body impression the next morning. The cast measures 3.5 by 5 feet and weighs about 400 pounds. No camera was left running overnight.
Who read it how: Grover Krantz and the wildlife biologist John Bindernagel examined it; Krantz believed a sasquatch made it. Jeffrey Meldrum examined it and reported dermatoglyphic detail in what he interpreted as the foot area. The expedition's own diary records that three of six apples were gone, the melons had been pecked by birds, and elk, deer, bear and coyote tracks were found nearby — and that the group reasoned the animal "did not want to leave tracks".
The test result: on 3 March 2001 Mark Hume, writing in Canada's National Post, identified clear elk tracks and imprints matching an elk's legs, and read the cast as, at most, the impression of an elk's hindquarters. Hair recovered from the site was reported as elk (this pack has not located the laboratory report itself). That is the publishable outcome: the finest "body" evidence in the corpus returned the species that had already left its tracks around it.
Why the reasoning, not just the result, is worth printing: a body impression with no matching footprints is not an anomaly to be explained — it is exactly what an elk lying at the mud's edge and reaching for fruit leaves behind, and it is why the site shows a body print at all. The group's own note that the animal "did not want to leave tracks" is the tell: a real animal's avoidance behaviour was being read as evidence of concealment by a hypothetical one.
Sources: sources.md → Wikipedia index (Skookum cast, citing the Animal X material, Hume in the National Post, 3 March 2001, Meldrum 2006 and McLeod 2009) (Tier B).

6. Myakka River, Sarasota County, Florida — December 2000 — the letter to the sheriff

Rating: D (unresolved artefact, improbable as described) · Status: an anonymous mailing to a law enforcement agency, and the arithmetic does not close

What arrived: in December 2000 the Sarasota County Sheriff's Department received two photographs and a typewritten anonymous letter. The writer identified herself as a grandmother, said the animal had been stealing apples in her backyard near the Myakka River, and — her own framing — asked: "Is someone missing an orangutan?" She put it at six and a half to seven feet tall in a kneeling position, said it made deep "woomp" noises and left "an awful smell that lasted well after it had left my yard." This produced the enduring "Myakka skunk ape" photographs.
The problem with the size claim: if the animal is 6.5–7 ft kneeling, it is roughly 10 ft standing. The largest male orangutans are about 4 ft 5 in. The letter also has the writer standing within 10 feet of it, noting that "an animal this big could hurt someone seriously" — and staying to take a second photograph. The mailing was anonymous and typewritten, so no witness could be interviewed; no follow-up is on record and no specimen, hair or sample entered any file.
The honest verdict: this is a documented artefact with an unusable chain of custody. It belongs in the register because a sheriff's department received it and because it is the most-reproduced "skunk ape" image in circulation — not because it constitutes a report anyone can test. By this pack's language it is reported only, from a source that cannot be reached.
Sources: sources.md → Futility Closet, "Skunk Ape" (Tier D, quoting the letter and the photographs); Wikipedia index / Wikimedia Commons (image provenance) (Tier B).

7. Newberry County, South Carolina (2 November 2024) and Voluntown, Connecticut (5 July 2026) — two reports the BFRO called credible

Rating: C (reported, with the reporting machinery visible) · Status: two reports that reached the press mainly because of who filed them

South Carolina, 2 November 2024, ≈06:30: an officer with a South Carolina police department was deer hunting on his family's property near Pomaria, about 25 miles northwest of Columbia, sitting in a ground blind along a power line route. He reported a deep grunt and a stomp, then a 7–7.5 ft tall, amber-coloured, human-like figure with long arms and an ape-like face. The two looked at each other for about 30 seconds before it walked away. He has hunted the area since childhood. The BFRO published the report (id 77862) and its founder Matthew Moneymaker interviewed him at length, saying "he is indeed a police officer for a jurisdiction on the west side of South Carolina. He is very credible." The organisation's stated reason for weighting this report is the witness's occupation — a filter this pack records as a selection effect, not a measurement.
The reason it is worth printing: the BFRO's credibility test, as its own founder describes it, is "the strength of the actual sighting" — reports from adults, and especially from people who were sceptical beforehand, are preferred over those from amateur hunters who went out looking. Selecting witnesses for prior disbelief is a reasonable instrument against motivated reporting and a poor one against misidentification in poor light, which is the leading mundane reading for a bipedal figure at 6:30 a.m. in autumn hardwood cover.
Connecticut, 5 July 2026: a driver — not an officer — reported a figure crossing the road at about 1:45 a.m. at Voluntown, just outside Pachaug State Forest; the BFRO graded it Class A, and the witness gave the organisation a video interview at the site. National outlets covered it in late July 2026 under the framing that the organisation called the report credible. Connecticut is a useful control: it is a small, densely populated, heavily walked state, and the organisation's own count for it is 22 reports considered credible since 1953, with the earliest a 1953 sighting by a group of children in Shelton — against 29 total listings for the state in the same organisation's public database (10). The two counts come from different years (2023 and 2026), but the 2026 coverage still quoted 22, so the gap stands; the press reports the smaller number.
Sources: sources.md → WRHI/CN2, 20 November 2024, quoting BFRO report 77862 (Tier C); WSET/ABC15 and WCIV coverage of the same (Tier C); WTNH/NEXSTAR, 20 October 2023 (the 22-report figure and the 1953 Shelton report) (Tier C); CBS News New York, 31 July 2026, and Live 5 News (Tier C); BFRO database (Tier D — volume and claim history only).

8. Southern China — Gigantopithecus blacki — the candidate, delimited in 2024

Rating: A (peer-reviewed, dated, and it removes the folk hypothesis) · Status: the only fossil ape of the right size and time, and it is both the wrong size of window and the wrong hemisphere

The claim it tests: the most respectable form of the Bigfoot case — associated with Grover Krantz and still repeated — is that the reports describe a surviving Gigantopithecus, a giant ape known from the Pleistocene of southern China, whose range could in principle have crossed Beringia.
The paper: Zhang et al., "The demise of the giant ape Gigantopithecus blacki", Nature, 10 January 2024 — three multidisciplinary analyses (timing, past environments, behaviour) across 22 caves in southern China, using 157 radiometric ages from six dating techniques.
The result: G. blacki persisted in China from about 2.0 million years ago and went extinct in a window of roughly 295,000 to 215,000 years ago. Just before and during that window, increased seasonality changed plant communities and expanded open forest. Its relative Pongo weidenreichi adapted its diet and behaviour; G. blacki showed signs of chronic stress and dwindling populations.
Why this is the strongest single test result in the file: a 215,000-year gap requires the claim to cross not only a quarter of a million years but Beringia and a continent, and the fossil record it would have to leave is already being sampled in caves — this is not a survey gap of the kind 01-methodology.md bias 5 warns about. Nothing about human occupation of the Americas or about a modern ape population follows from the paper; what follows is that the one named fossil candidate is now bounded, and the bound is in Asia and in the deep past.
The genetic record, for completeness: Sykes et al. (2014), Proc. R. Soc. B 281: 20140161, analysed hair samples attributed to yeti, bigfoot and other anomalous primates; every sample matched a known mammal, except two Himalayan samples that aligned with a Pleistocene polar-bear haplotype from Svalbard, which the authors read as a bear — possibly a hybrid — rather than a hominin. Other researchers then challenged even that: Edwards and Barnett, in the same journal (282: 20141712), argued the match was DNA degradation rather than a novel bear. The study's one "anomalous" result — from Himalayan (yeti) samples, not Bigfoot ones — was contested inside the journal that published it. The federal equivalent is on the site already: the FBI laboratory's 1976–77 hair examination returned deer (released 2019; case CR-0029).
Sources: sources.md → Zhang et al., Nature (2024), doi 10.1038/s41586-023-06900-0 (Tier A); Sykes et al., Proc. R. Soc. B 281: 20140161 (2014) and Edwards & Barnett, Proc. R. Soc. B 282: 20141712 (2015) (Tier A); FBI Vault, Bigfoot file (Tier A/C).

9. Bluff Creek, California — 1967, examined again in 2026 — "Capturing Bigfoot" and the reel from the safe

Rating: C (documentary evidence, contested) · Status: a 59-second film whose provenance chain has a new hole in it, and a special-effects counter-claim on record

What the film is: the Patterson–Gimlin film, shot on 20 October 1967 at Bluff Creek, northern California: a short 16 mm clip of a hairy upright figure walking away from the camera. It has been the single most-cited artefact in the subject for nearly sixty years. The existing case file records the hoax case (Bob Heironimus's claim to have worn the suit; Philip Morris's 2002 claim on Charlotte radio that he made it), Gimlin's consistent denial, and the unresolved dispute over the gait.
The 2026 development: Capturing Bigfoot, a 103-minute documentary directed by Marq Evans, premiered at SXSW on 12 March 2026 (US release 20 October 2026). It is built on a reel of 16 mm film found in a locked safe after the death of Norm Johnson, who by People's account ran Boeing's film department and developed the original 1967 footage. His daughter, the Olympic College film instructor Teresa Brooks, gave it to Evans in June 2022 by Wikipedia's account, or June 2024 by People's; the sources differ. Digitised, it contained a 40-second clip "produced and developed" in 1966 — a year before the famous film — showing a skinnier Bigfoot walking through wooded terrain resembling the later location: in the film's framing, a dress rehearsal.
The second line of evidence: Clint Patterson, Roger Patterson's son, told Evans that about ten years earlier his mother had told him the sighting was a hoax. He says he intended to make it public; his mother, he says, was upset at the loss of income and disowned him. Bob Gimlin appears in the film.
The counter-claim, printed as this pack requires: the film is not one-sided. A Hollywood special effects artist interviewed in the documentary flatly maintains that faking the specific details visible in the original is not possible, and this position is not new — it is the technical spine of the defence Meldrum and others have made. The integrity of the film image has also been examined academically — Bill Munns and Jeff Meldrum, "Analysis Integrity of the Patterson-Gimlin Film Image", The Relict Hominoid Inquiry 2: 41–80 (2013). That is Meldrum's own journal, hosted at Idaho State University, and Munns is the effects artist who makes the same argument on camera, so it is the defence restated, not an independent check.
What it changes, and what it does not: the 1958 tracks had a family admission; the 1967 film now has a contemporaneous object — an earlier reel with a different figure — in addition to a family account. What none of it provides is a specimen, and the dispute is entering its seventh decade with the two sides still arguing about the same 59 seconds. That is the honest summary for a card.
Sources: sources.md → Wikipedia index (Capturing Bigfoot; Patterson–Gimlin film) (Tier B); People, March 2026, and Skeptical Inquirer's coverage of the film (Tier C); ISU anthropology research paper on the film image (Tier B).

10. The register itself — 75,000 reports, 5,500 kept, one state with none, and one day of the year

Rating: B/C (the organisation's own published counts, and the press that repeats them) · Status: the volume is the most real thing in this file, and it is produced by a filter, not by a survey

The volume, as its own founder describes it: the Bigfoot Field Researchers Organization (founded by Matt Moneymaker in the mid-1990s, with about 500 people reviewing reports) has received nearly 75,000 reports over the years, of which it considers only 5,000 to 6,000 "credible" — roughly 5,500 credible reports since the mid-1990s, including encounters recalled from decades earlier. Reports are excluded if the witness will not speak to an investigator, or if the account is secondhand.
The distribution, read from the database on 25 September 2026: the public geographic database carries 5,769 listings across 49 of the 50 US states — no Hawaii — plus a separate international column. The top of the table is Washington 734, California 471, Florida 348, Ohio 335, Illinois 305, Texas 264, Oregon 262. The most recent reports in the table run to September 2026. This is, on inspection, a map of forest cover, rural population and everyone's willingness to file: it is the same finding this pack records for the 2019 state counts, and it is not a range.
The international column, which is the most instructive number here: Australia 1, China 11, Indonesia 3, Malaysia 36, the Himalayan region 10, Russia 5, all other countries and regions 6 — 72 entries in total, or 1.2% of the database, with the most recent Russian report dated 1989 and the most recent Malaysian report 2006. The same organisation that has 734 Washington reports has five from Russia. The database is a publication about North America with a foreign-language appendix, and any claim that "bigfoot is reported worldwide" is resting on that appendix.
The two numbers that disagree: for Connecticut the database shows 29 listings, while the organisation's "credible" count given to reporters is 22. Both are the same organisation's figures. When a press story says a report was "deemed credible", it is quoting an editorial decision by an advocacy body — one this pack rates Tier D for volume and claim history, and never as evidence.
One day of the year, and why it matters to a register: the Mobile County Sheriff's Office in Alabama issued a "FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE" dated 1 April 2026 announcing that it was investigating a reported Bigfoot sighting, framed as "big foot, little foot, we respond to all calls" — and posted a comparable April 1 release the year before. The county's association with the genre is older: in April 2022 a prank by a Wilmer resident, complete with photographs, went viral and picked up national coverage. None of this is evidence of anything, and it is not presented as such. It is here because a register that cannot tell a joke from a report is a register with no floor — and because the date on which agencies and pranksters both file is now a known property of the dataset.
Sources: sources.md → BFRO geographic database, retrieved 25 September 2026 (Tier D — volume and claim history only, as the tier rules require); WTNH/NEXSTAR, 20 October 2023 (the 75,000 / 5,000–6,000 figures and Moneymaker's account of the filter) (Tier C); Mobile County Sheriff's Office releases, 1 April 2025 and 1 April 2026 (Tier D); NBC15 (WEAR), 15 April 2022 (the Wilmer prank) (Tier C).

What this file does not claim

Nothing here has been verified by science. No specimen, no tissue, no photograph under controlled conditions, no repeatable measurement, in any of the ten sections.
The best physical evidence in the corpus has a mundane reading attached to it in the same locality. The Skookum cast returned elk hair and elk tracks (5); the Cripplefoot track line came from a town whose record includes a mine-shaft sasquatch and a freezer foot (4); the founding tracks were admitted by the hoaxer's family (1).
The named fossil candidate is now bounded — Gigantopithecus blacki is dated to an extinction window of 295,000–215,000 years ago in southern China, from 22 sampled caves (8). That is a result about Asia and the deep past, and it closes the most respectable version of the claim rather than opening it.
The volume is the phenomenon. By the organisation's own 2023 account nearly 75,000 reports have been filed and 5,000–6,000 kept as credible; its public database lists 5,769 from US states as of September 2026, 98.8% of all its listings, and has never recorded a report from Hawaii. Volume at this scale is produced by a filter and a culture, and it is not the same thing as a population.
The word itself is a translation, twice over. "Sasquatch" is a schoolteacher's anglicisation of se'sxac published in 1929 against the stated preference of the elders in the account (2), and "Bigfoot" is a road crew's nickname that a 1958 newspaper printed as one word (1). Both names travel better than the beings they replaced.