Myth or reality? Bigfoot sightings tracked over past century

You may be surprised to learn that, since 1926, Bigfoot has been spotted stomping through Colorado 130 times.

That’s according to the Bigfoot Field Researchers Organization, based in Dana Point, Calif. It may also be surprising to learn that a Bigfoot Field Researchers Organization actually exists.

Then again, polling has shown that more than 1 in 5 Americans believe the big guy is out there, just out of sight. That’s roughly the same number who believe the universe began with the big bang.

The Bigfoot Field Researchers Organization is headed by Matt Moneymaker — a researcher featured in Animal Planet Channel’s reality documentary TV series “Finding Bigfoot” — who’s pursued the hairy, large creature, also referred to as Sasquatch, since the 1980s.

In Colorado, sighting reports typically come from the mountains. Bigfoot apparently isn’t a fan of the Eastern Plains, and tends to avoid the big city traffic, too.

“If you live in the city, you might not know what people who live in the mountains know,”  Moneymaker said. “They know a lot of other people up there who’ve seen them.”

Whether you believe in its existence or not, Bigfoot recently made headlines after a Wyoming couple riding a railroad posted a video to social media that appeared to show a Bigfoot stomping through southwest Colorado in October.

It was the first sighting in the state since 2021 — likely because Sasquatch has kept busy, with thousands of incidents reported across North America, BFRO reports.

Colorado is the No. 11 state with the most Bigfoot sightings. Washington ranks at the top of the organization’s list with over 700 reports, followed by California with about 460, Florida with almost 350 and Ohio with over 300. In spots No. 5 through No. 10 are Illinois, Oregon, Texas, Michigan, Missouri and Georgia.

Moneymaker’s take is this: It’s not one lone Bigfoot traversing the continent, but between 2,000 and 10,000 Bigfoots, he said. “If there was more than 10,000, there would probably be a lot more sightings.” The theory continues: The animals are likely survivors of a line of primates called Gigantopithecus blacki, relatives of orangutans. Scientists from the Institute of Evolutionary Biology and the Globe Institute at the University of Copenhagen depict the species as giant apes “more than three meters tall that inhabited the forests of Southeast Asia and became extinct 300,000 years ago.”

But Moneymaker believes that they didn’t permanently disappear — instead, some migrated to North America from Asia millennia ago.

Moneymaker said elk hunters count as one of their most common reporters in the state. Because Bigfoots walk on two legs, their bipedal form “gives pause to someone even pointing a gun in their direction,” he said.

In Colorado, for one, only 130 sightings are posted on Moneymaker’s group’s website, but it’s received thousands of reports in the state that ultimately didn’t make the cut. Established in 1995, BFRO — made up of over 3,000 members in the U.S. and Canada — evaluates each submission, flagging them for falsehoods and weak evidence.

“We’ve become more and more picky over time,” he said. “You’d be astounded by the fraction of what we show publicly, and what we have in raw form otherwise.”

Next year, his organization is holding a Bigfoot expedition in Colorado from Aug. 8-11, bringing attendees to “areas where they will have encounters with Bigfoots at night,” according to the website. The cost usually averages between $300 to $500 per person, Moneymaker said.

“You’re not going to fully believe it until you actually see one, face to face,” he added.

Carson Mencken, professor and chair of the sociology department at Baylor University, describes the demography of the Bigfoot community as “almost exclusively” made up of men, usually white males of all ages, who spend a lot of time outdoors.

Comparatively, women are more likely than men to believe in ghosts, hauntings and psychic abilities. According to his research and surveys on paranormal beliefs, more than 50% of Americans maintain a supernatural belief — similar to the percentage of Americans who believe in guardian angels, which he describes as “sort of an acceptable paranormal belief,” Mencken said.

For generations, Western society — the U.S. and Europe included — has nursed subcultures around paranormal phenomena, although they don’t usually overlap, he said.

“There’s not many people out there who believe in everything,” Mencken said in an interview. “You don’t have a ghost hunter who also believes in Bigfoot, who also hunts for aliens, who also goes to psychic fairs.”

His religious upbringing in the Baptist church — and his decades as a Christian since — spurred his fascination in his academic research focus.

“Most of the people who believe and spend money and time investigating the paranormal lead pretty normal lives,” he said. “They have pretty good jobs. Frankly, the travel and expense of being a paranormal investigator is expensive — you need money to do it.”

Other sightings throughout Colorado

Bigfoot made its first documented appearance in July 1926 in Jackson County, according to BFRO data.

The incident was reported in 2003 by an anonymous woman from Cheyenne — then 66 years old — who heard the anecdote from her father, describing him as an “avid hunter and fisherman” who always kept binoculars close at hand.

In 1926, near the town of Walden in northern Colorado, he watched from “a long way off” as an elk was stalked by what appeared to be two bears in an area with heavy timber. Under the late afternoon sun, “he still thought they were two bears until they started walking,” the daughter wrote. “He said they were a brown color and quite large when they stood up.”

For context, Colorado’s forests are home to around 17,000 to 20,000 black bears, according to Colorado Encyclopedia. With fur coats that range in color from blonde to cinnamon to brown, black bears are typically active from mid-March through early November, hibernating in dens through most of the winter. They can stand and walk on their hind legs, but their preferred posture is on all fours.

According to BFRO data, the aughts counted as the decade with the most Bigfoot sightings in Colorado — more than 50 — as Sasquatch apparently came out of hiding to celebrate the turn of the century.

One such instance occurred in August 2000 in Clear Creek County near Bakerville when two friends — one identified as a man named Mike French — and a dog hiked Loveland Pass. About five miles into their journey, they reached a valley, and descended below the tree line into a high-mountain meadow with a stream at around 4:30 p.m.

“We began to hear what we thought were noises from a large animal across the stream,” the witness wrote. “I started catching glimpses of a large, hairy, brown and black animal and thought we were following a bear.”

As a result, the pair slowed their pace to a halt as the animal took notice of them. Although “its height made it look like a bear reared up on its hind legs,” it moved downstream “in a long, loping, two-legged” gait, according to the report. The accompanying dog didn’t bark or react with any aggressive excitement — its purported usual behavior, which it had previously displayed with an adult black bear — but “only showed the polite interest he shows in people in the woods.”

---

A few other sightings:

• An encounter in May 2006 in El Paso County by an unnamed soldier stationed at Fort Carson. That sunny morning, he took his son — then 3 years old — turkey hunting on Bureau of Land Management land. After he set up and started his diaphragm turkey calls, he caught movement 600 yards away. His binoculars focused on an object larger than a turkey — about 6 to 7 feet in height.

“What I saw, I don’t know for sure, but it appeared to be walking upright on its hind legs and was covering a great deal of ground in a short span of time, but was not running,” with dark brown to black coloring, according to the report. It disappeared minutes later into high brush and thickets.

“I have told no one of this, thinking myself to be a little crazy at the time, but I know I wasn’t seeing things.”

• An encounter in August 2000 in Alamosa County in southern Colorado. On a cloudy afternoon, a teenager and his uncle rode four-wheelers past Lake Como through the Sangre de Cristo Mountains. The pair spotted “something that looked like a dead, burned tree stump that was about 7 to 8 feet tall,” according to the report. Then, “it stood upright and walked like a man.”

Initially, they guessed that it must be a hiker. After it walked into the trees, they decided to go looking for it. Once in sight, they ran after it on foot. Standing about 20 yards away, the reporter described it as a creature with matted fur, long arms and brown coloring. They lost it soon after.

“I know what I saw that day and no one can tell us otherwise,” the anonymous witness wrote.

Source: Orange County Register