How Bigfoot got its name

"The father of Bigfoot"

The term "Bigfoot" is a relatively new term. But where did the word come from?

Bigfoot has been part of Native American belief for hundred of years and has several different names. In the 1920s, J.W. Burns started to take the stories from the Native American culture and made a series of Canadian newspaper articles. Burns coined the name "Sasquatch" from the word "Sésquac", meaning "wild man", to use in his articles.

A nephew of Ray Wallace holds the carved,
wooden feet that his uncle used
to make Bigfoot tracks.

And then in 1958, "Bigfoot" was born. It was at Bluff Creek, California, a worker named Jerry Crew at Ray Wallace's construction company found large 16 inch human-like footprints. The story was picked up by the Humbolt Times of Eureka, California. They used the name "Bigfoot" in the newspaper article. This was the first time the name was used and eventually stuck, replacing the name "Sasquatch".

44 years later, Ray Wallace died at the age of eighty-four on November 26, 2002. His family felt it was time to let the world know that Bigfoot's coffin was nailed shut. As his son Michael put it, "Ray L. Wallace was Bigfoot. The reality is, Bigfoot just died." His children announced that their prank-loving pop had created the modern myth of Bigfoot when he used a pair of carved wooden feet to stomp a track of over-sized footprints in a Northern California logging camp in 1958. The New York Times bought the claim and in a front-page story, identified Ray Wallace as the hoaxer behind Bigfoot.

The newspapers ran headlines proclaiming Bigfoot's death. It was obvious the media loved the story of two crusty old-timers pulling the wool over the true believers' eyes, just as Doug and Dave, two geezers with too much time on their hands, had supposedly created thousands of increasingly elaborate crop circles in the United Kingdom.

Briefly, the Bigfoot world turned upside down.

Members of BFRO were called to arms and geared up for battle. This was a battle for the truth. The BFRO released these statements:

• The Wallace story has been debunked, scientifically. It was a lie. The wooden track stompers shown to the media by the Wallace family do not match photos of the 1958 tracks they claim their father made. They are different foot shapes. See for yourself.
• It is not physically possible to fake tracks with the shape, depth and stride of the Bluff Creek tracks, using any kind of wooden track stompers. Go ahead and try it sometime. Stompers large enough to produce the tracks cast in 1958 act like snowshoes in soft soil. They cannot create the heavy compression seen in the 1958 casts.
• John Green has offered $100,000 dollars to anyone who can recreate the tracks the Wallaces claim their deceased father created. The Wallace family can't do it. One of the Wallace family members nearly killed himself trying to do it, as he was towed behind a pickup truck while wearing the wooden stompers, in front of media cameras.
• The Wallace family waited for their father to die before propagating their bogus story, because Wallace himself would have been easily discredited upon cross examination by those who could prove he didn't know the key details about the tracks found by Jerry Crew.
• Scientific luminaries such as Jane Goodall and George Schaller have recently become vocal advocates for the authenticity of the real evidence indicating the existence of these animals.

The world's largest Bigfoot organization then later released an editorial on the Wallace Story labeled "One Member's Perspective":

The story was hot, and it was everywhere -- on TV, newspapers, and radios around the world -- in December 2002. It proclaimed that "the truth can finally be told about Big Foot". Virtually every major newspaper and broadcaster in the United States fell for it. A family had "finally come forward to reveal the truth". They claimed their deceased father had started the whole legend. It was all him. He was Bigfoot. They said they knew it, and they had the fake tracks to prove it.

The Wallace family proudly exhibited some wooden track stompers to the press. They claimed these were used by their father, Ray Wallace, to create the legend of Bigfoot in the late 1950's. It was only a harmless prank, they explained, but it got out of hand and took on a life of its own, with the help of Ray.

Different members of the Wallace family told different versions of the story. Some claimed Ray only started the legend, then other people apparently faked other tracks in other areas. Various other Wallace family members claimed that Ray made all the tracks himself, anywhere and everywhere they appeared.

The media bought all of it. There was nothing the media wasn't going to believe.

Some Wallaces claimed Ray was behind the Patterson footage as well. Ray's widow said it wasn't her in that costume, and she didn't know anything about it. The rest of the Wallaces still wanted to credit Ray for the Patterson footage somehow. They could only say they were sure he had something to do with it.

Even after thousands of credible eyewitnesses had come forward over the years to report their sightings, and piles of scientifically valuable evidence had been collected, the media still continued to falsely claim there is no evidence for the existence of bigfoots. But ironically, when a rural family came forward with some far-fetched, inconsistent claims, about a man who was locally famous for being a wild story teller, and his son held up some carved wooden track stompers ... that was nothing short of unquestionable proof to the mass media, and so it was affirmed by Jay Leno of NBC, Aaron Brown of CNN, Shepard Smith of Fox News, The New York Times, etc., etc.

Many people were amazed and confused at the downright ignorance of the media. People knew that sightings, encounters and track finds extended far back into the American history. They also knew the only significance of the 1958 finds was that the term "Bigfoot" was first coined then, and that term eventually supplanted the hundreds of local names across the continent, such as the Boggy Creek Monster of Arkansas, the Skunk Ape of Florida, the Mountain Devils of Vermont, the Omah of Northern California, and the Wendigo of the Great Lakes region.

The only thing that began in 1958 was the familiar nickname most people came to remember, not the track finds, the sightings, or anything else related to this subject.

Bigfoot researchers knew more about the Wallace family's claims, because they had dealt with Ray since the 1960's:

• Ray's fake tracks and stompers were on display, hanging on the walls of his roadside tourist shop for years. The Wallace family recently implied that Ray had kept them in hidden since the 1960's.
• Ray himself never claimed to have created the original "Bigfoot" tracks. His family attributed it to him only after his death -- conveniently when he wasn't around to deny it, or to be cross-examined by the surviving people who had been to the site at the time. Even the locals, like Al Hodgson in Willow Creek, who knew Ray Wallace well in the 1950's, say he wasn't in that part of California when the first tracks were found. All Wallace did, according to Hodgson, was complain that the footprints were making his workers quit and driving his company out of business.
• The family didn't realize that Ray's fake casts weren't even the same size and shape of the 1958 casts. The news media didn't want to complicate their hot story with that troublesome fact -- Wallace's fake casts and stompers do not match the "Bigfoot" casts. No one in the media bothered to look at the obvious discrepancies in the photos. In one photo a Wallace family member holds the stompers he claims Ray used to make the original "Bigfoot" tracks found by Gerry Crew. The other one is the famous photo showing Gerry Crew holding the large cast which inspired a local reporter to coin the term "Bigfoot". It didn't matter to the media that they are visiblly different foot shapes. The story was too hot to treat responsibly. And it was about a "myth", so it didn't require any of the usual fact checking.

A news-flash sums it all up with a statement from cryptozoologist Loren Coleman:

Reports that Bigfoot is dead may be greatly exaggerated. Although the mainstream press is touting the recent death of Sasquatch prankster Ray Wallace as "the death of Bigfoot," cryptozoologist Loren Coleman says the legend is alive and well. Coleman says Wallace is called "the father of Bigfoot" because he made his claims in 1958, around the time the term, "Bigfoot," first appeared. However, there were numerous Sasquatch sightings between 1850 and the early 1900s and native Americans have been depicting the hairy creature on totem poles for 500 years. Coleman says there's more than enough evidence proving that the Bigfoot legend is something that existed long before Wallace's pranks and not simply his hoax. In fact, he says folks who assume Bigfoot sightings will disappear now that Wallace is dead may end up putting their big foot in their mouth.

Video: How Bigfoot got its name