The stories behind the legend: The search for Bigfoot and the FBI’s file on “Sasquatch”

While mankind has explored nearly every corner of the Earth, there are still magical places of untamed wilderness into which few venture. Lurking in these vast expanses every now and then some new creature is discovered.

But these are generally quite small, so easily overlooked. One that is between six and fifteen feet tall it would seem should be hard to miss.

However, Bigfoot, or Sasquatch, and his cousin the Yeti, or the Abominable Snowman, have alluded those who have tried to track them down. Yet over the years there have been random stories of sightings from people that just happened upon these ape-like beings which have captured the imagination.

How the stories of Bigfoot began

The Yeti has been a part of folklore in the Himalayas for a long time. A wild, hairy ape-like creature that inhabited the high snowy mountains.

Likewise, indigenous societies in North America had stories about a similar creature, Sasquatch, that date back to before European settlement. But the modern legend and name Bigfoot is much more recent.

The story has it that the craze over the Bigfoot myth got its start in 1958, according to History, with a newspaper article in the Humbolt Times. A journalist at the newspaper, Andrew Genzoli, published a letter that he had received from a reader which spoke about loggers in northern California finding mysteriously large footprints.

He thought it’d make for some fun reading on a Sunday morning and jokingly wrote: “Maybe we have a relative of the Abominable Snowman of the Himalayas.” Little did he know that readers would be fascinated by the story, and their interest spawned more stories and the legend of America’s Bigfoot took flight.

Yeti hunter comes to America and gets FBI to investigate Bigfoot

Nearly 50 years ago the FBI opened a file on Sasquatch when the agency received some hair and tissue samples from Peter Byrne which he asked to be tested. In a special exception to department policy, the assistant director of the FBI’s scientific and technical services division, Jay Cochran Jr., complied out “the interest of research and scientific inquiry.”

Bryne was one of the world’s most prominent Bigfoot researchers and in the early 1970s established the Bigfoot Information Center and Exhibition in Dalles, Oregon. He had developed his passion for Bigfoot after meeting Americans who told him about the creature while he was searching for the Yeti in the Himalayas.

He had ended up in India after he served there with the British Royal Air Force. Those expeditions into the mountains were driven by his father telling him bedtime stories about yeti when he was a child, shared The Washington Post.

While Cochran sent him the results of his examination of the samples in February of 1977, just over two months after having received them, Bryne says he never got the results until the FBI’s ‘Sasquatch’ file surfaced in the media in 2019. Cochran’s study had concluded that the hairs were “of deer family origin.”

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