When Did Bigfoot Become Popular? What Year?

[Guest SoFla]

I was listening to a radio show back in the mid-90's and there were these two people on it talkin g about how the whole UFO thing was about to explode with shows like The X Files, and some of the movies coming out Independence Day type things and the reason being was they were all in an effort to bring the subject to the mainstream and away from the whole "Little green men ha ha ha" thing. They were right, the idea now that there may be life outside of our atmosphere is pretty much a given with 75% of humans now.

 

I see the same thing happening now only it won't take as long with the whole Sasquatch idea, with the shows now, as crappy as they are and You Tube. So to answer the OP's question I'd have to say maybe since the turn of the century is when it has begun to be pushed. Even now the whole "big scary monkeys in the woods" is getting as old as Little green men had become. We're getting there people.

[Guest Darrell]

 

Jiggy-

The problem is, that Sasquatch is not a legitimate scientific topic. To a vast majority of people who have had a cursory glance at the Bigfoot phenomenon, it is a joke. Bigfoot comes down from UFO's, Bigfoot is an emissary from the 5th dimension headquartered at the center of Mars, Bigfoot raped me and I liked it, Bigfoot braided my horse's mane, Bigfoot stole my beans, and left me a dead birdie as payment. These are just the beginning, the media people have had people coming forward with their Bigfoot videos, and press conferences and every one of them turns out to be a hoax. How can you blame anyone on TV news for being anything BUT mocking?

You keep talking about the 'New Evidence', it's the same evidence regurgitated in different formats time after time. Film, Video, FLIR, Bumbling stars of Bigfoot TV Series, it is ongoing Fail! year after year.

And yet we now know the hobbit and homo

Heidelbergensis existed in Asia until at least 12000 years ago. And we have found a completely new species in the fossil record homo denisova in Asia as well.......,.

So the fossil record gets bushier and bushier as time goes on, with Asia being a prominent place for new discoveries.

With the hobbit having its own native myth surrounding it, the natives called it ebu gogo.

So while science can avoid the subject of Sasquatch or yeti or yeren or whatever because they find it impossible for something like that to still exist?

The evidence to the contrary is actually stacking up against them.

 

Yes, but just because we find those things in the fossil record does not make bigfoot real. When we find new dinasaur species thru fossils do we assume dinasaur species still exsit undiscovered today?

[Guest DWA]

Um, Drew.

 

Um.

 

Drew.

 

"Sasquatch is not a legitimate scientific topic"?

 

That a mantra now?

 

I'm actually thinking about putting together a course and teaching it to you.  Free.  You need savin' guy.

[Trogluddite]

Well, 

 

Here's the list of dates I've compiled because I wanted to know if encounter spikes were due to publicity. Now, some of these events were likely not as compelling (in generating "buzz") back in the pre-internet days, when we only got our news by word of mouth from town criers.  Also, something that caused a "buzz" in a certain segment of US society (UFOs, bigfoot, whatever) did not necessarily cause a buzz throughout the entire society. 

 

Tirademan’s NY Times article about the wildman                 18??

MacLean’s article on wild men of NW Canada                      1929

 

Shipton footprints at Mt. Everest                                      Nov 1951

Daily Mail Everest Yeti expedition                                        1954

Bluff Creek footprints found by Jerry Crew                              1958

True (magazine) article on Bluff Creek footprints                Dec 1959

 

Tom Slick’s Pacific Northwest Expedition                              1960

Patterson-Gimlin film                                                         Oct 1967

 

Ivan Marx (fake) Bigfoot film                                                  1971

Legend of Boggy Creek                                                        1972

Ancient Mysteries                                                                1973

In Search Of                                                                         1976

 

Harry and the Hendersons                                                      1987

Wild Creek photo of bigfoot                                                  Jul 1995

 

Skookum Cast found by BFRO                                             Sep 2000

Sasquatch: Legend Meets Science                                          2003

Jacobs trailcam photos                                                         Jun 2007

MonsterQuest (Russian Apeman)                                        Jan 2008

            

Finding Bigfoot                                                                       2011

 

(Edited because why the heck should the forum eat my nice neat table that showed up in the draft and then came out as doodoo when I hit "post?") 

Edited February 1, 2014 by Trogluddite

[Oonjerah]

For future reference, two column tables:

 

--- 1692  Massachusetts witch trials 

Apr 1912  sinking of the RMS Titanic

 

Dates on left gives a bit more spacing control. 

Columns of indeterminant length on far right. 

[Trogluddite]

^^^^^

Tell that to the computer. I had a very neat table w/all the dates on the left. The computer converted it all to text, with the dates on the right and I had to manually space it.  

[TD-40]

I don't see Ape Canyon or Albert Ostman's stories from 1924 on your list. Weren't they published in newspapers?

Edited February 2, 2014 by TD-40

[gigantor]

The premium section of the BFF has Tirademan's (R.I.P.) historical newspaper archive which he donated shortly before his passing. There are 211 old newspaper articles as of today and more are being added as manpower allows.

 

Back in the 1800's it wasn't called bigfoot, but "wildman" stories were all the rage, so the sightings have been going on for at least 150 years. Below is a sample article, all Premium members have access to the archive.

 

Edited February 2, 2014 by gigantor

[Guest]

I had the Bigfoot board game when I was about 8 in the mid '70's. I remember seeing the PGF at the movie theater before the movie came on around that time too.   

[WV FOOTER]

Being known real or not and being popular are two separate entities, IMO.  I think that Bigfoot became popular in  1967 with the release of the PGF. I remember seeing the PGF as a lead in at the local movie theater. I have never seen that particular piece of film ever again. It was pretty cool too. Since then, Bigfoot's popularity has only grown to where it is today.JMO

[Trogluddite]

I don't see Ape Canyon or Albert Ostman's stories from 1924 on your list. Weren't they published in newspapers?

They might have been published locally, but that doesn't mean they were believed ... Much like I don't think a McLean's magazine article about Canadian stories (Oh! Sorry Canada!) of bigfoot likely influenced people in say Ohio or New York who reported seeing a wild man or wild ape.  I'm not even sure how much the P-G film influenced culture when it was released as it probably barely registered among all the hippies and other stress of the late 60s. 

[MIB]

They don't have to be generally believed.   They just have to plant the seed of curiosity, to make someone ask "what if?" and wonder enough to pursue an answer rather than let the question die on the vine.    Every article, every discussion, even the ones that seem to look bad for the community intrigue someone somewhere.

 

MIB

[hiflier]

Hello All,

I'll take a stab at the OP and say Jerry Crew Oct. 5, 1958.

Edited February 3, 2014 by hiflier

[Trogluddite]

I don't see Ape Canyon or Albert Ostman's stories from 1924 on your list. Weren't they published in newspapers?

I'll throw those in ... I'll also have to add the first well investigated Bigfoot encounter (Bigfoot ransacked the house for the fish barrell, can't think of the family's name).  But even if those stories were reported in local newspaper articles, they didn't generate national attention. 

 

The 1871 New York Times editorial is funny in that it mentions "wild man" sightings throughout the US, although it attributes the encounters to being Soldiers driven crazy by wars or on expeditions and wandering wild.  They wanted the stories put to rest by capturing and re-educating the "wild men."  Now, I don't think that the 1870s NYT is what the NYT is today in that it likely did not have national and worldwide distribution, but it probably still had a big audience.  Yet even this editorial did not appear to trigger a widespread national movement to resolve the wildman issue.

 

While Leonard Nimoy and the 6 Million Dollar Man may have generated intense interest in Bigfoot and UFOs in the 1970s, I don't believe that they generated broad interest in either.  Maybe a certain slice of people became interested, I'd be willing to bet that the vast majority went, "Uh, yeah, Bigfoot, um huh .... will you look at the time?"  

[Guest DWA]

With regard to the 1871 Times editorial, the "wildman" was of course a standard 19th-century referent, given that there weren't any widely-recognized biological models for what this might be.

 

As Bindernagel points out, "gorilla" became a standard referent once Western society became widely apprised of that animal's existence.