The idea of Bigfoot exists across cultures and continents: Some believe the Yeti lives in Asia’s Himalayas, and there have been sightings of Almas in the Caucuses.
Even in North America, variations exist: The Skunk Ape’s been sighted in Florida. And in the Northwest, there’s Sasquatch. The Chupacabra’s a bit farther south, and in Virginia, the Woodbooger’s been commemorated with a statue.
Depictions of these creatures also traverse time. And as one speaker noted at the Wintergreen Resort’s recent Blue Ridge Bigfoot Festival, drawings that can be understood as the evasive creature exist in Native American art.
Susan Lee came up from North Carolina to attend the festival and called herself “a believer.”
“I feel like they are another species of creature that we just haven't really had exposed to us, like other normal creatures that we've seen — bears, lions and tigers. This is something that's been very elusive,” Lee said, showing off her T-shirt, featuring the cryptid crowned as hide-and-seek world champ.
The late September festival was the resort’s third time organizing and hosting the gathering, which also included live music and a handful of folks hocking merch. A Wintergreen representative said they expect the event to return in the future.
Jamie Lewis, a sociology professor at Cardiff University in the United Kingdom, co-authored “Bigfooters and scientific inquiry: On the borderlands of legitimate science” with Andrew Bartlett. The academic distinguished between accepted modes of scientific research and a unique strain of citizen science that’s deployed at events like the one at Wintergreen.
“Bigfooters are something different altogether. They're not working in alignment with traditional science. In fact, they're contesting science in many ways,” Lewis said broadly about people investigating the cryptid. “They're certainly contesting institutional science, and they're testing the belief that Bigfoot does not exist. They're trying to collect data to prove institutional science wrong in many ways.”
Lewis said about 160 people were interviewed for his book and acknowledged that a dominant demographic emerged — but noted women also engaged in Bigfoot research.
“It’s predominantly a white male, rural, blue collar, working-class pursuit. So, there is an element within the community of ‘boys with their toys,’” Lewis said. “A lot of people who I interviewed were ex-military.”
In 1967, the Patterson-Gimlin film was made public and purported to show definitive evidence of Bigfoot’s existence — a large, hairy animal walking on two legs through the forest. The film’s remained a topic of discussion in the Bigfoot community since; a new documentary about the short film is due out this month.
The movie also emerged at a time of societal upheaval, the civil rights movement and Vietnam War changing Americans’ understanding of the world. There’s a similar societal shift at work now, perhaps accounting for a 2018 study showing belief in Bigfoot was on the rise.
Outside the Wintergreen ballroom where presentations were taking place, Daniel J. Benoit — founder of the East Coast Bigfoot Researchers Organization — discussed first seeing the Patterson-Gimlin film and how it sparked his interest.
“I was always getting out in the woods anyway, but it opened up a new world to me,” said Benoit, who lives in Augusta County. “Somehow, that footage opened up and made my senses more alert. I started paying attention to stuff. I started looking into other research. I started digging and doing my own personal research, and looking at who was involved and why they were involved.”
One night in May 2014, Benoit said, he had his first encounter with Bigfoot in the George Washington National Forest. And while he’s put his own Bigfoot event on hiatus, Benoit said he still heads out into the Virginia wilderness to search for evidence.
“I'm not here to convince you. I just have my own honest conclusion based off of some of the evidence that I looked at and gathered over the years,” he said. “I honestly believe that they are an unclassified primate. I'm not saying they're human. I'm not saying they're not human. … [B]ased off of the evidence that I look at, based on their diets, their behaviors, everything that's reported, to me, everything's pointing towards some type of primate.”
Matthew Ricker, who took in the speakers at the Wintergreen event with Susan Lee, said he’s seen what might be Bigfoot tracks, but hasn’t seen one of the creatures.
“We've kind of stopped exploring the oceans, and we've started exploring space,” he said. “There's still so much more out there, and there's still so much more even in the woods and the forest that we just don't know about.”
But Ricker added, he was surprised that no one’s “landed a Bigfoot while bear hunting.”
There’s not an answer for why that is. But the absence of physical evidence has led Lewis, the Cardiff professor, to ask: Where’s the body?
Americans have been fascinated by the possibility that Bigfoot exists for decades. It could all be mythology or lore. But even if that’s the case, Lewis said, it serves a purpose.
“They stand for this kind of escape from the everyday troubles that individuals have. They stand for some sort of rebellion against elites or something that's happening in the world, and they stand for regional identity and place identity: ‘This is our cryptid.’ It was almost like America needed its own major cryptid. America doesn't have its own great ape other than humans. It's almost like there was an element of American exceptionalism required as well,” Lewis said.