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In a similar vein, too sports sites that I follow which used to have vigorous discussions during every game and about every aspect of the teams are also vastly smaller now yet you get prompts to "follow" every single baseball player on X, Rumble, and those other platforms even if they hit less than Mario Mendoza. The Forums may have to change and even then may still get overtaken by the shift in communications preferences by different generations, as BackDoc pointed out. Interestingly, while I'm of the generation that first saw Bigfoot on In Search of and The Six Million Dollar Man, I lost all interest in it until the early 2010s. And even then my first reaction was, "this really can't still be a thing, can it?" So I agree that as us older folks move on, the Forums will likely shrink because younger folks aren't as interested and don't consume news the same way. Matt Moneymaker made a comment on a recent Bigfoot and Beyond podcast that younger researchers he has met haven't gone back any further than Finding Bigfoot. When he asks about John Green or Grover Krantz, he gets a blank stare and a "who is that?"

It doesn't help the show Finding Bigfoot never seems to actually find Bigfoot. As some point it becomes a joke which I have to think does little to help interest in Bigfoot. Because of this show, there has to be part of the public who would say, "Bigfoot, isn't that those people who are out there in the woods but never find him?"

We have 8 pages of comments on this topic alone. We may not be what we once were but we are certainly far from being dead.

I will say I have not had any Bigfoot experience personally. My guess is such an experience would be life-changing to those who have. They might report it or not, but I have to think someone having such an experience is changed forever. I agree as you say Bigfoot has become a cultural thing. Who knows if this is a good thing or a bad thing. I don't know if my childhood was typical but most of us who grew up back in the day (I was born in 1966) grew up with 3 channels on TV to watch. If the Wizard of Oz was on you watched it that night or you couldn't see it again for another year. Assuming 1/3rd of the country (3 channels to watch) was watching that means millions all shared the same basic experiences then. There were a lot fewer things competing for our time. I have to think for those who grew up then they all had a similar view of Bigfoot. I always felt then Bigfoot or the Yeti was always presented as a real creature. It seems to me the feeling was more of a universal understanding because the few outlets presenting Bigfoot as a topic (Peter Graves) made the argument to say Bigfoot DOES exist vs DOESN'T exist. The internet and media are now like McDonalds. There used to be only a few items to choose from. Now they try to offer everything.

It is an interesting question. Nuanced. I think you have to separate those with a general interest from those with a specific interest stemming from some kind of personal experience. I think what you're talking about is those with general interest, not those with experience. Unfortunately, the waters are muddied today by bigfoot becoming a sort of cultural "thing". A lot of people are aware of the notion of bigfoot now who don't have much interest, don't pay the topic much mind. That wouldn't have been true in Oct '67, for example. MIB

Dr. Squatch soap and deodorant are awesome! I think that the further the younger generation gets from their hunting roots and woodsmanship, the less they care about nature other than in a general, climate change way. The less one cares about nature, the less something like sasquatch comes up in their thoughts or cares. Because I am a hunter, have loads of woodsmanship, am very old and spend a lot of time in nature, sasquatches are important to me.

Winner, winner, chicken dinner. However, I suspect that the Forums management would not want us to say that "X researcher's post about whatever" can be proven to have been hoaxed." When I first got interested in Bigfoot circa 2010 or so, I relied primarily on a website by a person who is such anathema to the Bigfooting world that even mentioning his name here led to banishment. One of the things this person did (although not why he was persona non grata) was outline the different lawsuits threatened, filed, claimed, etc. by one bigfoot "researcher" who felt slighted by another bigfoot "researcher." That being said, your analysis appears to be spot on and the visual aids support your claims. Way back in the day (2013ish or so), I had visited this particular sight and/or read about it here and found videos claimed to having captured a bigfoot playing tic-tac-toe or playing with ghosts. Needless to say, your two reports simply add to the conclusion that claims by this individual merit little weight.

Probably the appraised auction value like with antiques because of all the fossils we have here we call members, speaking for myself in the antiquarian sense too