Bigfoot walks into a bar and says.....

OK, no Bigfoot jokes. Just hoaxes. I did this little doodle while on a less-than-interesting conference call the other day and I thought I'd explore this subject. After all, Halloween is coming up and what better time to turn to the subject of legendary monsters?

I admit that I'm fascinated with the big guy. Bigfoot has a rich and far reaching history, but the biggest headlines come from the hoaxes. Let's take a look at a few.

American Indians may well have been hoaxing Sasquatch for hundreds of years. Some Indians believe that he only manifests himself to those who have lost their way in life as a sort of warning. Can't you just see some tribe throwing a bear skin on the biggest guy and having him stomp around in the woods to scare some wayward teen back to the straight and narrow? They may well have used the same method to scare off early European settlers. OK, I watched a lot of Scooby-Doo when I was a kid but none other than Teddy Roosevelt related his own story that sounds a lot like a scare tactic to me. Europeans reported seeing a big hairy man-like creature as far back as the 1830's. Hmmmm? You can check out some more Bigfoot history here, including a sighting by Leif Eriksen in 986 AD!

The 1884 story of "Jacko" a Canadian Bigfoot reportedly captured turned out to be a hoax. Just over 70 years later, the discovery of foot prints (the very prints that spawned the "bigfoot" nickname) caused a minor sensation. Later, these were found to be the work of Ray Wallace who'd been using wooden "feet" to make the tracks for years. Then, as recently as 2008, two Georgia men claimed to have a bigfoot corpse. It quickly turned out to be just what it looked like: a monkey suit stuffed into a freezer with some road kill gut thrown on it. Hardly worth mentioning really.

Then, in 1967, Bob Gimlin and Roger Patterson may have produced the most successful hoax of the 2oth Century. They filmed the creature in the aptly named Bluff Creek area of California. Here's the clip. The only footage subjected to more scrutiny may be the Zupruder film! Experts of all kinds have analyzed the film and most findings are that it can't be disproved. Some even believe it couldn't have been hoaxed as humans aren't capable of duplicating that famous Bigfoot gait. In the end, it may have been good old detective work, not science, that exposed the hoax.

The author of The Making of Bigfoot, Greg Long, has apparently exposed Roger Patterson as an extraordinary con man and connected the dots to the person who made the suit and the one who wore it. Intriguing details, such as the suggestion by Philip Morris, the suit maker, that football shoulder pads be used to bulk up the beast lend an air of authenticity to the story. Experts have always pointed to the fact that Patterson's Bigfoot is obviously female (she's affectionately called Patty) and it's highly unlikely anyone would have thought to hoax a she-squatch. That is unless they were familiar with William Roes famous 1955 affidavit of his sighting and detailed description of a female sasquatch. Patterson was reported to have been interested in the bigfoot mystery so he may have based Patty on that description.

Still, many refute Long's work as flawed. Shows like Monster Quest still analyze the film. People still believe. People still see bigfoot too. Take a trip over to the Bigfoot Field Researchers Organization and check out the recent sightings (attention scout masters: great fodder for campfire stories!). He's seen all over this country and others; Australia, China, and Poland to name a few. It seems every human culture has a legend similar to Bigfoot.

Many of the sightings can be explained has lies, hoax victims, wacko's or mistaken identity. But there are surely a few made by rational people who believe what they saw. Perhaps the great mystery then is: what did they see? Not: is bigfoot real? Maybe there's a deep human instinct that hearkens back to prehistory when Homosapiens competed with other human species. Who knows?

One school of thought is that, for every day that goes by, we are one day closer to finding the hard fast proof that the creature exists. On the other hand, it may be that for every day that goes by without evidence, it becomes less likely evidence exists. I guess it depends on what you believe.

Me? Well, I hope he is out there and that we never find him. I love mysteries....