Researchers have yet to find solid evidence that the Bigfoot monster really exists on Earth.

Bigfoot, or Sasquatch, is a giant primate-like creature thought to roam North America. This is a mysterious creature, like the Chupacabra or the Loch Ness monster. There’s not much evidence that Bigfoot actually exists. Some encounters with this creature do not clearly capture its face or shape.

The majority of Bigfoot sightings occur in the northwest, where the creature is associated with Aboriginal lore. The word Sasquatch is derived from Sasq’ets, a Halq’emeylem word used by some Aboriginal people of southwestern British Columbia, meaning  “wild man” or “hairy man”.

In 1884, the British Colonist newspaper in Victoria, Canada published a description of a “gorilla-like” creature in the area, sparking many other myths. John Green, author of Sasquatch, compiled a list of 1,340 cases from the 19th to the 20th centuries.

In 1958, the Humboldt Times, the local newspaper in northern California, published a story about the mysterious giant footprint discovery near Bluff Creek, California. In the story, they call the creature  “Bigfoot”, according to Smithsonian Magazine. Curiosity about Bigfoot grew rapidly in the second half of the 20th century, following a True magazine article published in December 1959 that described the 1958 discovery.

Footprints near Bluff Creek was a hoax by a man named Ray Wallace, as told by his descendants after his death in 2002. Over time, Bigfoot gradually became familiar across the continent. There have been more than 10,000 stories of Bigfoot in America over the past 50 years. According to these accounts, Bigfoot is described as being 2.4 to 3 meters tall and covered in fur.

Most reports are based on unreliable memories. Similarly in cases, witnesses can be influenced by emotions and omit or misremember important details. With mysterious creatures like Bigfoot, the human brain can construct explanations for events that it cannot immediately interpret. Also, many people want to believe that Bigfoot exists.

The most famous Bigfoot video is a short film shot in 1967 by Roger Patterson and Bob Gimlin. Filmed in Bluff Creek, the video shows a tall, hairy primate-like creature walking on two legs, striding across the clearing. The reliability of the video is still controversial. Most likely it was a trick and the primate-like creature was a human in disguise.

With the popularity of high-quality cameras in mobile phones, photos are becoming increasingly sharp, but Bigfoot is an exception. The logical explanation is that Bigfoot isn’t real and the creature photo is a scam or a mistake. Some people claim to hear Bigfoot screaming, howling, howling, or other sounds. The strange sound recordings associated with Bigfoot sometimes attract media attention, but the noises are often attributed to known animals such as foxes or coyotes.

There is no solid evidence of Bigfoot’s existence. When the specimens suspected of belonging to Bigfoot were analyzed scientifically, experts discovered they were of normal origin. For example, in 2014, a team of researchers led by the late geneticist Bryan Sykes from the University of Oxford, UK, conducted a genetic analysis of 36 hair samples belonging to Bigfoot or Yeti, primate-like creatures. The same is said to inhabit the Himalayas. Nearly all hair samples come from common animals such as cows, raccoons, deer, and humans. However, the two specimens closely match a Neolithic polar bear. They may belong to an unknown species of bear but are not primates.

Genetic research provides another reason to doubt the existence of Bigfoot. A solitary organism cannot reproduce and maintain a population. For species like Bigfoot to survive, they need large enough populations to avoid inbreeding and low genetic diversity, or else they will go extinct. The existence of multiple Bigfoot would lead to an increased chance of an individual being killed by a hunter or hit by a driver on the highway, or died of disease/age and discovered by a farmer or climber. However, researchers have yet to find the body of Bigfoot.

Scientific evidence of Bigfoot’s existence may be scarce, but a giant bipedal primate once lived on Earth. That species is named Gigantopithecus blacki, about 3 m tall and weighing up to 270 kg, based on fossils. Even so, Gigantopithecus lived in Southeast Asia, not North America, and became extinct hundreds of thousands of years ago. They are also more closely related to modern orangutans than humans and chimpanzees.