Bigfoot is said to live in North America and Nessie in Scotland. Some people say a big, hairy creature called Bigfoot lives in forests in the northwest of North America, walking on two feet, standing taller than a grown-up and covered in long, dark hair. Some people believe a big animal lives in Loch Ness, a very big lake in Scotland that holds more water than any other lake in Britain, and they call it Nessie, and people who report Nessie often describe a long neck, or humps that stick up out of the water. The question for each is the same one: what separates a report of a creature from evidence of one? A report is a description of what a person says that they saw, while evidence is something that other investigators can examine independently.
The written history of Bigfoot begins in the twentieth century. J.W. Burns was the first to write about Sasquatch, collecting accounts from people in his community for a 1929 Maclean's magazine story. The word Sasquatch comes from a Salish word that means "wild men." The one-word name Bigfoot came later, after a worker in California found huge footprints near a road being built in 1958, prints that were nearly 16 inches long. That year a California newspaper, the Humboldt Times, started calling the maker of the footprints "Bigfoot." These early sources are the written record of the names, the dates and the first accounts, and they are where a reader can begin to ask what was actually shown. Each of these early accounts is documentation of what was reported, and none of them is physical evidence of an animal that investigators could examine independently.
The footprints were later challenged, and in 2002, after Ray Wallace died, his family said he had made the 1958 footprints with carved wooden feet. After the Wallace feet were revealed in 2002, news of the hoax barely registered with Bigfoot believers, and in 2019 the paleontologist Darren Naish said interest in the creature was at an all-time high. Plaster casts of tracks said to be Sasquatch's are often offered as proof, but whether the tracks are genuine is highly disputed. The Wallace account concerns the 1958 prints in particular, and it does not by itself settle the question of every other track that has been reported or cast. Taken together, these statements show why the footprints are treated as part of a story as much as a measurement. Each of these statements concerns the past, and each can be set beside the others, which is how a historian or a scientist checks whether a story holds together.
The most famous film said to show Bigfoot was shot in 1967 near Bluff Creek, California, the same place as the 1958 footprints. Roger Patterson and Bob Gimlin made a 59-second film of an ape-like figure walking, and the film has been studied for decades. Critics said it showed a person in an ape suit, while its supporters say it has never been conclusively debunked, and a costume maker's claim that he sold the suit was not backed by proof, and no one has verified the film as showing an unknown animal. The film is a report in motion, and the disagreement over it concerns how its images should be interpreted, with critics and supporters each drawing on the same short footage. Together these details show that the story of the film rests on what can be seen in a 59-second film and on what the people who made and studied it have said about it. A film is a different kind of record from a footprint, because it shows movement over time, and for that reason a short clip can be reexamined repeatedly by people who disagree about what it shows.
The Loch Ness story has a clearer starting point. The modern Nessie story began in 1933, after a new road along the loch gave people a clear view of the water. Nessie witnesses number in the thousands: Nicholas Witchell counted more than 4,000 accounts. Many people who reported seeing something at Loch Ness were sober, level-headed people, such as scientists, teachers, police officers and fishermen. Scottish folklore is full of mythical water creatures, and many early Loch Ness reports seem to have been inspired by it. These accounts, and the stories that came before them, are the raw material of the Nessie question, and each one has to be weighed carefully on its own merits. Reports from respected people deserve to be taken seriously as reports, but a report is a description of an experience and is not an object that other investigators can handle or measure.
Photographs have carried much of the case. In 1934 a photo seemed to show a long neck rising out of Loch Ness, and it was called the Surgeon's Photograph, which had such an impact in part because it came from a respected London doctor. It was shown to be a hoax in 1994, about sixty years after it was taken, and it was built from a toy submarine with a model head and neck fitted to its conning tower, the scene staged on the loch. Detective work helped confirm the hoax: a 1975 newspaper clip said the photo showed Loch Ness scenery, and the full, uncropped photo, published only once in 1934, did show far shoreline. Some doubts remain about the Surgeon's Photograph confession, however, and journalist Richard Smith noted that toy experts question whether 1930s toy submarines could have performed as described. The 1994 account says that the monster in the photograph was a model on a toy submarine, and the doubts recorded since then show that even a hoax account can be questioned.
Hoaxes have a cost beyond the picture itself. In 1933 footprints found at Loch Ness were sent to the Natural History Museum in London, where experts said they were made with a hippo-foot umbrella stand or ashtray. After the 1933 hippo-foot tracks, the incident tainted the monster's image and discouraged serious investigation of Loch Ness. In 2016 a robot drone found a 33-foot Nessie film prop on the bottom of Loch Ness, made for a 1970 movie. Many sightings at Loch Ness could be waves, boat wakes, logs, birds, seals, otters or swimming deer. Evidence offered for Nessie has included photos and films that turned out to be fakes, hoaxes, or misreadings of known objects. A prop and a staged photograph are both objects made by people, and neither was an animal, so each shows how a human-made object can enter the discussion about a creature.
Sonar uses sound to find things under water. From 1958, four sonar expeditions at Loch Ness were launched, first by the BBC and then by Oxford, Cambridge and the University of Birmingham. In 1987 Operation Deepscan swept Loch Ness with a fleet of sonar boats, and three times it found objects in deep water that could not be identified or found again, and they were probably debris or thermal effects, or possibly a seal. Searches in 1987 and 2003 found no monster, and since Operation Deepscan in 1987, nothing in the several sonar sweeps of Loch Ness can be confidently read as a giant animal. Each of these sweeps produced a measurement from the water itself, and none produced a result that could be read as a giant animal, and the unidentified objects were described with qualifiers such as probably and possibly, because they could not be found again.
Hair provided a different kind of test for Bigfoot. The Oxford team said science should neither reject nor accept a claim without examining the evidence, so it ran a systematic survey of hair samples. For the study 57 hair samples came in. A plant sample and a glass-fiber sample were removed, and 37 were chosen for DNA tests by where they came from or their history. Only one hair gave human DNA, and the team said this showed its cleaning had worked, since old samples are often spoiled by human contamination. The study reports its numbers openly, including how many hairs came in and how many were chosen, and a reader can see for each step what was done.
The method was specific. The hairs were cleaned, a short stretch of mitochondrial DNA was copied, and the result was compared to a public database of animal DNA, called GenBank. The Oxford team tested hairs said to come from Bigfoot, the Yeti and similar creatures, and almost all came from known animals such as bears, horses, cows, raccoons and sheep. Professor Sykes said that tests showing hairs came from known animals do not mean the next one won't be something new. Earlier DNA studies of a Nepalese yeti sample and of Alaskan sasquatch hair both found hoofed animals, not apes. The test can identify what a hair came from, and it can say nothing about hairs that no one has tested. This kind of reasoning is characteristic of the genetic method, which can establish what a sample came from but cannot establish the existence of animals that were never sampled. In practical terms, a matching result identifies the animal that shed the hair and turns an unusual claim into an ordinary identification, and the hoofed animals in the earlier studies were identified as hoofed animals, not apes.
The Himalayan samples show how a result can change under review. Two Himalayan hairs in 2014 matched DNA from an ancient polar bear, and the authors called the result preliminary because the matching stretch of DNA was only 104 base pairs long. A 2017 survey of bears of the Tibetan Plateau and Himalaya said the earlier polar-bear match had been questioned, and it traced the yeti samples to local, living bears. In 2017 a team led by Charlotte Lindqvist found that eight hairs said to be from the Yeti came from bears of the Himalayas, and a ninth sample, a tooth, was from a dog. Researchers plotted Bigfoot sightings in a 2009 study and found they roughly matched the habitat of the American black bear, and some scientists think people who report Bigfoot may be seeing bears, which can stand up on two legs. These two results illustrate the importance of independent review, because the earlier preliminary match was questioned and the samples were traced to local, living bears.
The newest test for Loch Ness reads DNA from the water. Animals and plants leave bits of DNA in the water around them, from shed cells and waste, and scientists can collect it and read it. The eDNA method was devised in the 1990s, and it has proved crucial in tracking the spread of invasive species. The eDNA in the loch samples showed which animals and plants had been in the local environment in the previous 24 to 48 hours. In 2018 scientists from New Zealand took more than 250 water samples from Loch Ness to find out what lives there, and the survey found about 3,000 different DNA sequences, mostly from tiny things such as roundworms, plankton and small crustaceans. The method is attractive for the loch because it does not depend on anyone seeing, catching or photographing an animal.
The Loch Ness survey gave a mixed answer. Eel DNA turned up in nearly every sample, so there are a lot of eels there, and finding it was not a surprise to the team, since eels were known to live there. The survey found no plesiosaur DNA in Loch Ness, and no shark, catfish or sturgeon DNA either, and a plesiosaur was a sea reptile that died out about 65 million years ago. Eel DNA does not tell how big the eels are, so the 2018 team could not rule out giant eels or say that they exist. Gemmell said one idea his team could not put to bed was a very large eel or eel-like creature, since eel DNA is found throughout the loch. The survey also aimed to show the power of the method, and Gemmell said the monster was "the bait on the very big science hook." The results therefore tell researchers a great deal about what is present in the loch, while leaving the question of the size of its largest inhabitants unresolved by this particular method.
Science does have a record of confirming large animals that were once unproven. The giant squid was once known only from sea-monster stories, but it is a living animal of the deep ocean, and the first video of a live adult giant squid in the wild was shot in 2012 near Chichi Island, Japan, by a submersible that followed the animal about 900 meters down. A Natural History Museum giant squid, caught by accident in a trawler in 2004, was frozen right away, so DNA samples could be taken. The okapi, a rainforest relative of the giraffe, was unknown to science until 1901, and the coelacanth, a fish once thought extinct for millions of years, was found alive in 1938. The saola was first known from a skull with long, straight horns that scientists found in a hunter's home, and it was found by scientists in 1992 in Vietnam.
Those cases frame what a Bigfoot or Nessie claim would need. A species big enough to be seen has to have many animals, enough to breed, and some scientists doubt that such a group could stay hidden through all the searching. Others say a few big mammals, fish or reptiles may still await discovery in places like the forests of New Guinea or Southeast Asia, or in deep-sea basins. No body or bones of Bigfoot have ever been found, and no bodies or recent fossils of an unknown ape-like animal have been authenticated, and bones, carcasses, feeding signs or droppings would support an animal in Loch Ness, but none has been found. Most scientists do not think there is a monster in the loch, and they say this is because the evidence offered has not been persuasive, not because they refuse to look.
Other voices have joined the discussion. Jane Goodall has said she is sure such creatures exist, and she has heard Indigenous people on several continents describe sightings of Bigfoot-like creatures. A folklore professor says Bigfoot meets a deep human hunger for the mysterious and the magical, and shows that humans have not totally dominated nature. The leader of the Loch Ness survey, Neil Gemmell, said he did not believe in the monster, but added: "wouldn't it be amazing if I was wrong?" The question remains open for the believer and for the doubter, and each can point to the same records. Taken as a whole, the conversation about these creatures involves evidence, interpretation and human curiosity, and the arguments on each side are made by thoughtful people who are examining the same limited record of reports, tests and disputes.
Words to know
- preliminary: early, uncertain
- authenticated: confirmed genuine
- sonar: sound that finds
- folklore: traditional stories
- contamination: unwanted traces
- hoofed: having hooves
