Hidden in the shadows of towering old-growth foliage nestled deep in Allegheny National Forest, Daniel J. Benoit speaks before a crowd of around 250 people. Clad in a t-shirt, cowboy hat, and graying beard, Daniel looks more like your average hunter than a citizen scientist in search of the truth. But these eccentricities suit him and his subject.
“Anyone ever hear about the Russian experiments that happened in the early 1900s?” he polls the crowd, none of whom respond. “[Russian biologist Ilya Ivanov] outlined his idea as early as 1910 in a presentation to the World Congress of Zoologists in Graz. In Austria, by the way. In the 1920s, Ivanov carried out a series of experiments, culminating in inseminating three female chimpanzees with human sperm.” [1]
Daniel and the crowd are Bigfooters, a community of people who believe that Bigfoot, the hairy beast of cryptid lore, exists and can be found through methods scientific or otherwise. On this day, they’re gathered in Marienville, Pennsylvania, a small unincorporated community numbering just above 3,500 people, to examine different theories about the creature. Could Bigfoot be a human-ape hybrid created through artificial insemination?
“He failed to achieve a pregnancy,” Daniel states, sounding like an enthusiastic college professor lecturing on his favorite subject. “Chimpanzees—science says that they are our closest living relatives. Ninety-eight point eight percent, that’s a 1.2 percent difference. Now, that’s very close. But we’re still different. Just because we’re that close, doesn’t make us chimpanzees. We’re human. Then again, we’re still considered apes according to science. But our DNA, our genes cannot be inserted into one of these other species.” [2]
So much for Ilya Ivanov’s Bigfoot sperm bank.
***
Daniel is the founder of the East Coast Bigfoot Researchers Organization, a Bigfoot research group, and the keynote speaker at this year’s Forest County Bigfoot Festival, one of the largest grassroots Bigfoot gatherings in the United States. Each year, believers trek from surrounding states, and as far as Canada, into the woods of Western Pennsylvania to listen to experts like Daniel discuss the theories currently dominating Bigfoot discourse. I’m not a believer but this is my second year attending.
In my time traveling to these events, I’ve found Bigfooters, like many American subcultures today, are a people at war with themselves, and the world around them. Everybody is looking for answers, and festivals like this offer a steady supply of self-appointed know-it-alls. Some Bigfooters look to the Bigfoot Field Researchers Organization, a rival to Daniel’s EBCRO, and their now-defunct Animal Planet series Finding Bigfoot as a guide to argue that Bigfoot is a lost hominid, the scientific name for a great ape, while others turn to David Paulides’s Missing 411 series and its emphasis on the connections between the National Park Service, Bigfoot, and UFOs as a kind of mystical text not unlike a Bigfoot Kabbalah. (A recent Missing 411 documentary suggests vasectomies might stop alien abductions, so maybe Ivanov was onto something.) The only thing these Bigfooters have in common is that they can never seem to agree on anything, except that they’re all suspicious of the official story.
Never is this clearer than in Daniel and his search for Bigfoot truth. His lecture veers wildly between topics, covering everything from Bigfoot pictographs in indigenous art to Bigfoot hunting tactics, and although he seems to maintain an air of skepticism about certain subjects, he has pet theories he’s nursing. And as is increasingly common among Americans, one of his theories involves the government.
As Daniel speaks during his keynote lecture, he becomes increasingly agitated. I’m not sure why at first as he seems affable and easygoing, but then he launches into an unusual digression and claims that the government has been lying about Bigfoot’s existence.
“I always wonder and ask myself if Bigfoot was presented to a scientist, would they actually, officially acknowledge it?” he offers with a casual shrug. “I don’t know. There’s a possibility that they might already know; some people believe the government is involved.” [3]
Daniel believes that the government is hiding the truth about Bigfoot from the public, because to disclose this information would put “fear in people” and a “hurtin’ on the economy.” He elaborates on this in a one-on-one conversation the following day when I corner him at his vendor tent. There’s a big sign attached to the front of his table advertising a Bigfoot-themed wine called Squatch n Berry.
“If you look at what’s a big part of our economy and really what brings in the money,” he tells me, that irritation creeping back into his voice. “Now, you’ve got something like Sasquatch, and I use the spotted owl for an example. That little bird is only no more than eight inches tall—it shut down, it made a big part of the economy crash. It put a halt to the logging industry and put a lot of people out of work.” [4]
According to Daniel, Bigfoot disclosure would irrevocably alter Americans’ lives. “What legal action would have to take place?” he asks. At first I think it’s a question but then he continues speaking, almost as if he’s forgotten I’m there. “Would he have to be on an endangered species list? What would happen with all of the non-believers if they got word there really is a monster out there?” [5]
Listening to Bigfooters like Daniel, I get the sense that, as a community, they’ve grown to distrust many of their fellow Americans, most of all those figures they see as the establishment. For decades Bigfooters have faced scrutiny from a scientific community that attacks them, academics who pathologize them, and skeptics who mock them. Although Bigfoot as a concept exists across continents and cultures, the creature has never been accepted in the United States as anything more than a cultural hallucination born of late 20th-century tabloid kitsch. Instead of searching in the woods of Western Pennsylvania like Daniel, academics and journalists search for the creature in movies like Harry and the Hendersons and the headlines of the Weekly World News.
This is probably why some Bigfooters center their frustrations on a group vague enough to represent all of those varied interests, as conceivably the government is run by scientists, academics, and skeptics. And they wouldn’t be wrong. Government agencies do occasionally deny the existence of Bigfoot.
In October 2022, just a few short months before this year’s Forest County Bigfoot Festival, signs bearing the unmistakable logo of the Pennsylvania Department of Conservation and Natural Resources began appearing stapled to trees in state parks. One read:
“DUE TO ENCOUNTERS IN THE AREA OF A CREATURE RESEMBLING ‘BIGFOOT,’ WE ARE INSTRUCTING ALL PARK VISITORS TO OBSERVE ELEVATED PARK ETIQUETTE, BE CAUTIOUS OF YOUR SURROUNDINGS, AND TO KEEP THE LOCATION OF ANY SMALL CHILDREN/PETS WITHIN A TIGHTER SCOPE OF AWARENESS. DO NOT APPROACH THE CREATURE!” [6]
A representative from the DCNR was quick to respond. In a definitive fashion, leaving nothing to the imagination, the spokesperson sent out an email assuring the public that “Bigfoot is not real.” While some Bigfooters were happy with the response, suggesting it didn’t help their cause to fabricate evidence, others weren’t convinced. Could the DCNR be lying?
***
Bigfoot first captured the public’s attention courtesy of explorer Charles Howard-Bury, who, on a trip to Mount Everest in 1920, discovered footprints of large humanoid figures in the snows of one of its peaks. Howard-Bury’s Sherpa guides stated that the indentations likely belonged to the Metohkangmi, or “Wild Man of the Snows,” leading to a misunderstanding that would spawn dozens of imitators. According to historian Brian Regal in Searching for Sasquatch: Crackpots, Eggheads, and Cryptozoology: “As soon as [Howard-Bury] could he cabled this incident back to the nearest civilization, and journalist Henry Newman of the Calcutta Statesman intercepted it. Howard-Bury mispronounced and mistranslated one of the Sherpa names for the creature, and Newman in turn garbled it and wound up with an English translation: Abominable Snowman.” [7]
The Abominable Snowman, along with its sibling the Yeti, would appear in countless stories over the next forty years, inspiring both interest from institutions like the U.S. State Department—which issued a memo about Yeti-hunting in 1959—and private explorers—as in Sir Edmund Hillary and his 1961 climb of Everest in pursuit of the creature. [8] American and British writers fed this excitement, transposing oral traditions and stories taken from indigenous groups in areas surrounding Everest and the Himalayas, such as those told by the Lepcha people of Nepal and Tibet, onto tales of Western adventurers traveling abroad.
This would have a profound effect on American pop culture. Paranormal magazines like Fate mined the subject to great effect, publishing articles arguing from both sides of the issue. One from May 1959 asked its readers, “Are Nude Tibetan Lamas the Monstrous Abominable Snowmen of the Himalayas?” [9] Meanwhile, men’s magazines like True, which billed itself as “The Fact Story Magazine for Men,” offered true-ish accounts of the creature. Its December 1959 issue advertised an article by British Fortean writer Ivan Sanderson, on a stateside relative of the Yeti, titled, “The Strange Story of America’s Abominable Snowman”. [10]
Yet it would take a period of social and political upheaval for American explorers to find the modern Bigfoot. On October 20, 1967, two self-styled cowboys, Roger Patterson and Bob Gimlin, wandered out into the woods of Humboldt County, California, with a film camera in tow. Patterson and Gimlin claimed their purpose wasn’t to capture an image of Bigfoot, though Patterson had been hot on its trail for years after reading Sanderson’s article. (He would eventually be tied to a film called Bigfoot: Fact or Fraud, about “America’s Abominable Snowman”—a clear ode to Sanderson.)
Patterson’s film was to be a short docudrama about a native tracker (portrayed by Gimlin) pursuing a mysterious creature. “First of all, the reason that we were in this place is that I’d been filming a documentary on this thing for the past eight months or so,” Patterson stated in an interview in 1969. “I’d been going to areas, interviewing people that had seen these creatures, other than myself now, and we had went to this particular area because a month before this they had found three different sets of tracks.” [11]
The footage Patterson and Gimlin shot was less than a minute long, and it was blurry and hard to make out, but as with all great American stories, the details aren’t important. It’s the big picture that matters most. Patterson captured the biggest of pictures—Bigfoot, or Patty as she would come to be known to Bigfooters.
Patterson and Gimlin immediately recognized what they had and tried to spin their good luck into fame and fortune by touring the northwest with the footage, soon to be dubbed the Patterson-Gimlin Film. It became a surprise hit using a technique known as four-walling, where a savvy distributor rents a theater and inundates the area with advertising promoting a limited-time-only screening, typically for one week. Word of mouth travels fast in a small town, so get in and get out before anyone can identify what they’ve seen, Bigfoot or otherwise.
The Patterson-Gimlin Film was so successful using four-walling that the distributor that pioneered the technique, American National Enterprises, licensed Patterson’s footage for a documentary of its own, Bigfoot, the Mysterious Monster. [12] Employees of ANE eventually split off from the company, forming Sunn Classic Pictures, and recut the footage into yet another documentary, The Mysterious Monsters. Patterson’s footage has appeared in hundreds of documentaries, films, and television shows since.
But Patterson’s Bigfoot dropped into an unusual period in American history. The Patterson-Gimlin Film was shot just one day before hippies would attempt to levitate the Pentagon, on the opposite side of the country, in what was originally intended as a symbolic gesture protesting the Vietnam War. During this event, some of the leaders of the hippie coven seized on an opportunity to exorcise the Pentagon of literal demons, encouraging the crowd to join in an incantation of “Out, demons, out!” It was almost as if someone—Patterson, the hippies, or a force far more powerful than both—had opened a portal to a parallel America, one in which magic and monsters were real and anything was possible.
This flight from our world and into another would have been understandable, however, as by this time the country’s political problems seemed intractable. The United States had been mired in a prolonged war in Vietnam for almost 13 years, with no end in sight. What politicians said about the war didn’t match the realities of soldiers in the field or their families at home. Trust in the establishment was rapidly deteriorating. To describe this new phenomenon, journalists coined the term credibility gap—a phrase meant to identify a growing chasm between what politicians said and what the public believed. As one newspaper editor would write in October 1967, the same month of Bigfoot and the exorcism, “In plain English, therefore, a person who is accused of having a credibility gap is being accused in fancy words of not telling the truth.” [13]
Although Bigfoot was not initially a political figure, this same language would extend to the creature. “Scientists say reports of monsters are nonsense,” groused David Wolper, a producer at American National Enterprises, explaining to reporters why the public had embraced ANE’s film Bigfoot, the Mysterious Monster over scientific objections. “But no one believes them. I think there is a credibility gap between the scientific community and the American public.” [14]
Distrust of the establishment—the government, scientists, Hollywood, even—would be echoed two years later by Sunn Classic Pictures head honcho Charles Sellier. “I discovered there was a void for a particular kind of picture,” he told a Washington Post journalist shortly after the release of The Mysterious Monsters. “The people are becoming more aware of what’s good for them. They’re becoming more uneasy with what’s been coming. There’s a demand for less violence and sex coming from a lot of people out there.” [15]
What were the people demanding? By the end of the 1970s, it was Bigfoot. More than a dozen movies, from the ANE and Sun Classic documentaries to narrative films like The Legend of Boggy Creek and The Creature from Black Lake, most independently produced outside of Hollywood, played in small town theaters and drive-ins. The creature beamed into millions of homes via television shows like In Search Of and The Six Million Dollar Man. Even the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the intelligence agency that had spied on hippies as part of COINTELPRO during the 1960s, began hunting the creature in 1976.
Demand for Bigfoot has only grown since. Today there are close to ten Bigfoot museums spread across the continental United States. Cable networks like the Travel Channel and History play reality shows devoted to Bigfooters on a continuous loop. And, of course, there are the Bigfoot festivals, cookouts, and camping excursions, held every spring and summer, in small towns and rural communities—events like the Forest County Bigfoot Festival.
***
As the festival unfolds over three days, countless Bigfooters descend on Marienville to celebrate what the establishment, those scientists and experts David Wolper claimed were subject to a credibility gap, regard as a figment of the public’s imagination.
In some ways, the similarities between today and the period that gave birth to Roger Patterson’s Bigfoot are uncanny. America has committed itself to countless wars over the last 20 years and political attitudes are now more tied to resentment of those in power than any policies that might have a tangible effect in this world.
Festival organizer David Yeany draws an odd parallel on the final day of the festival. As he introduces the speakers, a collection of Bigfooters ranging from a YouTuber to an Appalachian tracker, he likens the event to a “Bigfoot Woodstock.” I ask him to elaborate on this shortly after, and he tells me, “Literally, northbound and Route-66, which is a major north-south route here for the southern gateway to the Allegheny National Forest, became a parking lot,” referring to a piece of Woodstock lore that involves thousands of hippies abandoning their cars and walking to the event. [16]
Yeany founded the festival in 2020 on a lark. Speaking with a representative from the Armstrong Neighborhood Channel two weeks before the 2023 festival, he stated his pitch was met with resistance. “The Forest County Bigfoot Festival was an idea my wife and I had during the beginning of the pandemic,” he said. “We were discussing how we could bring more business to Marienville—the pandemic was a very slow time for a tourist town like Marienville—and my wife said we should have a Bigfoot festival, and I agreed with her … We took it to the Forest County Business Alliance at the time, and I told them about it and they looked at me like I had two heads.” [17]
But much as the establishment was proven wrong about the viability of Woodstock so too has Yeany quieted his detractors. By his estimate, at least 10,000 people came to Marienville for the second day of the festival. It can be difficult to figure out when someone involved in the Bigfoot community is telling the truth, so I can’t be sure of Yeany’s account, but it sounds good, so why not?
“Every year it gets bigger,” Yeany states. In the background, Jim Bordwine, a Bigfooter from Virginia, describes a startling encounter with Bigfoot in the hills of Appalachia. Yeany, who doesn’t identify as a believer but associates with them nonetheless, has nerves of steel and remains unmoved by the tale. He adds, “The first year we had 45 vendors, the second year 75, and this year we had 100. We typically have eight or nine food vendors, but this year we had 15 and there were still lines. People ran out of food.” [18]
The continuing popularity of Bigfoot has me wondering if the experts are still navigating that credibility gap. Bigfoot was embraced in a time when magic seemed as likely to solve our problems as politics. Woodstock was billed as “An Aquarian Exposition,” an astrological phrase intended to convey a change in global consciousness, and given the significance of that event in the public’s memory, you could argue that it was the culmination of the magic hippies first conjured at the Pentagon. Peace and love became a powerful weapon. The FBI, after all, was spying on hippies at the same time it was hunting Bigfoot.
Then there’s Roger and Patty. Using only a camera, Patterson, like a skilled magician, ripped Patty from the pages of paranormal magazines into this world. Within a decade thousands of Americans believed in Bigfoot; today believers may number in the millions. A 2022 poll found 13% of Americans expressed some kind of belief in the creature. [19] What is that if not a change in consciousness?
***
As the festival drags on, I’m thinking over the question of the credibility gap. If we’re to believe government officials at agencies like the Pennsylvania Department of Conservation and Natural Resources, then the experts are right and Bigfoot can’t be real. But for people like Daniel J. Benoit and the attendees of the Forest County Bigfoot Festival, this answer isn’t good enough and hasn’t been since 1967. They see Bigfoot, even if we can’t see Bigfoot.
Then I see it. As I walk around surveying a variety of pop, folk, and kitsch art, I come across a man in his fifties or sixties selling Bigfoot t-shirts, beer cozies, and tchotchkes. I briefly fixate on a sticker of Bigfoot rocking devil horns in one hand and an AR-15 in the other. But as I continue to scan his table, half curious to see what the believers are buying and half looking for an ironic totem to take back to the city I came from, one with no known history of Bigfoot sightings, something catches my eye. I look the item up and down, standing there in a long silence that probably betrays a naivete to the believers around me. Looking at it, however, I can’t help but feel an affinity for the object.
It’s a small sign, the kind of thing you see littering countless front yards and highways during election season. It’s square, maybe 18×24 in size, and has a patriotic design with a blue background and red and white text. It’s recognizably and proudly American. And upon first glance, under normal circumstances, you might even confuse it for a lawn sign for a local politician. This sends me one final hippie digression.
The year after the Pentagon exorcism, in the run up to the 1968 Democratic National Convention, some of the same people who tried to levitate the Pentagon launched a failed presidential bid: Pigasus the Immortal, a domesticated pig channeling the spirit of the Greek mythological creature Pegasus, was nominated by the Yippies to represent them in that year’s election. According to legend, Pegasus was rewarded for his service by being turned into a constellation of stars, whereas according to civil rights lawyer William Kunstler, Pigasus was arrested with Yippies at the DNC and squealed on his owners. [20]
So, belief in Bigfoot isn’t a question of existence, much as the hippie belief in magic wasn’t a question of whether or not one could levitate the Pentagon. This belief, whether sincere or exaggerated, is a sign of resistance to a world you no longer recognize. It’s to poke a thumb in the eye of an establishment that would talk down to you and tell you that you don’t belong. And it represents a longing for another America, one parallel to ours where magic is real and monsters roam the forests. To find Bigfoot, or maybe America, one must accept that there are no answers left in this world and only by abandoning it can we hope to find those places where they might still exist.
The sign, existing outside of any conceptions I now have of time, space and irony, reads: BIGFOOT FOR PRESIDENT 2024. BELIEVE IN AMERICA AGAIN.’
***
[1] Daniel J. Benoit, “Forest County Bigfoot Festival ‘Daniel Benoit’ 2023,” Armstrong Neighborhood Channel, YouTube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fmvnwBl8W3M.
[2] Ibid.
[3] Daniel J. Benoit (Bigfooter) in a discussion with the author, June 11, 2023.
[4] Ibid.
[5] Ibid.
[6] Marcus Schneck, “Bigfoot warnings in state park are a hoax: state agency,” PennLive, October 11, 2022, https://www.pennlive.com/life/2022/10/bigfoot-warnings-in-state-parks-are-hoax-state-agency.html.
[7] Brian Regal, Searching for Sasquatch: Crackpots, Eggheads, and Cryptozoology (New York, NY: Palgrave MacMillan, 2011), 32.
[8] Jessie Kratz, “On Exhibit: The ‘Yeti Memo’,” Pieces of History (blog), The National Archives, September 28, 2017, https://prologue.blogs.archives.gov/2017/09/28/on-exhibit-the-yeti-memo/.
[9] Fr. Franz Eichinger, “Are Nude Tibetan Lamas Abominable Snowmen?,” Fate Magazine, May 1959, 30.
[10] Ivan T. Sanderson, “The Strange Story of America’s Abominable Snowman,” True Magazine, December 1959, 40.
[11] Roger Patterson, “Roger Patterson and Bob Gimlin Interview,” Sasquatch Chronicles, YouTube, https://youtu.be/QoImPp5svtU?si=nLmz1O_lWdzzDewd.
[12] Greg Long, The Making of Bigfoot: The Inside Story (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2004), 249.
[13] William Randolph Hearst, Jr., “Politicians in War, Politics,” San Francisco Examiner, October 1, 1967, https://www.newspapers.com/image/458486786/.
[14] United Press International, “Monster Footage Worth $,” Sunday Journal and Star (Lincoln, NE), September 28, 1975, https://www.newspapers.com/image/66915351/.
[15] Joel Kotkin, “Mormon father became mogul to make pictures for families,” The Californian (Salinas, CA), December 31, 1977, https://www.newspapers.com/image/520579463/.
[16] David Yeany (festival organizer) in a discussion with the author, June 11, 2023.
[17] David Yeany, “Forest County Bigfoot Festival 2023,” Armstrong Neighborhood Channel, YouTube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ei4BLZEL5dM.
[18] David Yeany (festival organizer) in a discussion with the author, June 11, 2023.
[19] Noah Brode. “U.S. Belief in Sasquatch Has Risen Since 2020,” Civic Science, August 2, 2022, https://civicscience.com/u-s-belief-in-sasquatch-has-risen-since-2020/.
[20] Alex Remnick, “The Pig Who Would Be President,” Retro Report, September 1, 2020, https://medium.com/retro-report/the-pig-who-would-be-president-fe6d2342ae6f.
— Robert Skvarla is a Philadelphia-based writer. His work has appeared in Creem Magazine, Covert Action Magazine, and Diabolique Magazine. You can find him on Twitter at @RobertSkvarla.