Three days with the true believers who won’t let Bigfoot die

This story began with an unusually small flyer. If you’ve ever passed a village noticeboard littered with advertisements for local events, group meetings and tiny festivals, and wondered who attends these kinds of things, the answer is: my friend Peter. I admire this about him. It means that his life is full of unexpected encounters with interesting people in and around Eugene, Oregon, where he lives.

The flyer, which Peter spotted at a tourist office in the spring, was just three inches square and advertised an event being held over a long weekend in July in the town of Oakridge, a 45-minute drive south-east of Eugene, called Sasquatch Summer Fest. He took a picture and sent it to me.

I’d been looking for an excuse to visit him for a while, and this event struck me as weird in a fun way, but also surprising. Like everyone, I’ve heard of Bigfoot. Chewbacca-looking guy, very tall, lives in the forests of North America, not real. More of a mascot for the Pacific Northwest than anything else, or an old, tired joke. But what intrigued me most about this tiny flyer, and its associated website, was that it seemed serious. The main events of the weekend — in fact it appeared the only events of the weekend — would be talks by Bigfoot experts, discussing their research and screening their documentaries. It had the air of a conference, rather than a festival.

I wouldn’t have guessed that Bigfoot is a preoccupation for anybody. In this day and age, where the suspicious-minded thinker has so many more pressing conspiracy theories to choose from, being into Bigfoot feels kind of hokey. Dated, even. The heyday of Bigfoot hunting was a good 60 years ago.

Surely now, in 2024, after decades and decades with no conclusive evidence that this creature exists, there couldn’t be people still holding out hope. Can there really be areas of America so little explored that someone might maintain a belief in an entire species of as-yet undocumented, enormous mammals living there? Nobody’s spotted one using, say, a drone? How can there be enough present-day experts to fill a three-day conference? How, perhaps more bafflingly, can there be enough people who’d attend such an event to justify its existence? I booked a flight.

Bigfoot’s cultural history is a long, mostly inglorious tale full of contradicting accounts and hoaxes. Many cultures have a myth of a wild man: a human-like beast that lives on the outskirts of civilisation. Bigfoot has its origins in First Nations lore. Although the two terms are used interchangeably, Sasquatch was once the name for the mythical wild man in Canada specifically, from a First Nations dialect word, sésqac. White anthropologists came to the west coast of North America in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, heard stories of wild men haunting the forests, and word spread. Throughout the mid-20th century, stories about Sasquatch (or “Bigfoot”, as it was dubbed in 1958 by Andrew Genzoli, one of the first journalists to write about huge footprints being reported in the forests of California) cropped up in the media, often as light-hearted fun to fill column inches. But it caught the public’s imagination, this missing link, a hunting prize bigger than anything else on offer in the wilderness.

Various expensive and fruitless expeditions were organised. Picture groups of men in gilets with loads of pockets, crashing about in the undergrowth and accusing each other of planting “evidence” such as moose fur and bear poop in strategic locations to garner media interest. Inexplicably large footprints, strange cries in the night. There are dozens of books covering the field of Bigfootery, written by believers, disbelievers and everybody in between, as well as thousands of hours of shaky camera footage and YouTube armchair history available online. Every piece of potential evidence pored over, debunked and re-bunked. Perhaps the most famous is what is known as the Patterson-Gimlin film, a minute-long piece of grainy footage taken by filmmakers Roger Patterson and Bob Gimlin in 1967 of a hulking, black figure walking along a stream bed in northern California.

Only last year, world news media picked up on a supposed Bigfoot sighting in Colorado, filmed from the window of a train. The North American Bigfoot Center in — incredibly — Boring, Oregon, receives dozens of reports every week about strange encounters in the forests. A Bigfoot has never been captured alive or dead, and there is no publicly available, conclusive evidence of any other kind that they exist. The FBI has been involved, as has Oxford university and the Smithsonian museum, and all have come up with nothing. And yet, there were Peter and I, one weekend this past summer, driving to Oakridge to meet the believers.

The Pacific Northwest is a loosely defined area stretching from British Columbia, Canada, down to the upper reaches of California, covered by thousands of square miles of forest. As you fly into Portland, you pass over a lot of it, great rolling swaths of dense pines punctuated by snow-capped mountains, uninhabited by humans. “If there is any chance of finding really extraordinary animals on the earth,” it will be “in those worlds almost all over the earth, which we have not yet found or not thoroughly searched,” wrote naturalist Bernard Heuvelmans in his 1955 book On the Track of Unknown Animals, which more or less birthed the field of cryptozoology, the study of animals that are legendary, extinct or unknown. The Pacific Northwest, with its enormous tracts of wild land, would certainly still count as one of these not thoroughly searched places.

Whether or not you meet the fabled beast, driving the highways of Oregon leaves you in no doubt that you are in Bigfoot country. We passed one billboard showing a Sasquatch in front of a house, emblazoned with the words “year round roofing is REAL”, and another that read “Big Feet, Bigger Party” which went by too fast to parse. We decided not to stop in at Squacho’s, a taco joint, or a gas station with a wood carving of a Bigfoot stood outside.

Am I blowing your mind too much here, or are we OK?

It was a Friday afternoon when we arrived at the festival, at Greenwaters Park, Oakridge. I would not describe the festival site as having much in the way of ambience. The park is next to a major highway, and forest fires further upstate meant the air had a beige, dusty quality. There were perhaps a hundred cars parked up, including a truck with a decal reading “US Forest Service Sasquatch Department”, and a scattering of tents visible among the trees. The festival’s centre was a little amphitheatre, around which vendors were selling Bigfoot knick-knacks from beneath marquees, sheltering from the heat.

We’d decided to camp for the weekend rather than drive back to Eugene each night, to allow ourselves the fantasy that we, too, might be wild men. While Peter pitched our tent right on the banks of the Willamette river, I went to catch the first of the weekend’s talks at the amphitheatre by a woman called Kristi Sanderson.

A professional Doberman breeder, Sanderson was here to tell us about her encounter with Bigfoot. Walking in the forest on Mount Hood some years ago, she heard a disembodied voice saying, “Bigfoot here. Big man coming.” She froze, thinking she could see something black moving in the trees.

“I thought, ‘Is it a bear? A shadow? No, I thought, I’m making stuff up,” she told us. A bear is a fair first guess if there’s something big moving around in the forest in this part of the world. That or an elk, a mountain lion, a deer. But she got out her phone and began taking pictures, just in case it was something more sinister. Eventually, she got scared and went back to her car, where the voice spoke again. “Delete those,” it said. She began deleting, but stopped herself. The images of Bigfoot she had to show us today — on printouts because the sun was too bright for the onstage television screen — were the pictures that remained.

“I call this one Freddie Mercury cos he’s got long hair down the side of his face,” Sanderson said.

I looked closely at one of the photographs. Where she was seeing the late lead singer of Queen in this image, I could not imagine, but there was a dark smudge in among the trees that could, if you wanted it to, look human-shaped.

Next up was a man called Tobe Johnson, who was wearing a Hawaiian shirt with a motif of a Sasquatch on it. “Welcome to Woodstock for Sasquatch, it may just be worth getting COPD to hear this!” he announced. There was indeed quite a lot of ash in the air by now, blurring the sun above us and, I supposed, getting lodged in our lungs. Johnson said he had set up what he likened to AA meetings for Sasquatch “experiencers” at a pizza place west of Eugene, where people could come and talk about their encounters in a non-judgmental environment. He described a debate he’d had with himself, early in his Bigfoot research. “Am I gonna be a dude looking into the flesh and blood phenomenon of this, or am I gonna look into the stranger side?”

This used to be a contentious divide among Bigfooters, whether Bigfoot was a living species or something not of this world. “Fringe ideas could not be filtered out of Sasquatchery,” as Joshua Blu Buhs puts it in his 2009 book Bigfoot: the Life and Times of a Legend, partly because of the antipathy towards science that many Bigfooters feel; partly because Bigfoot’s indigenous origins are as a supernatural, spiritual being. Arguing that Bigfoot was an alien or other paranormal creature with the ability to apparate at will also neatly explains why no one has ever captured one.

The enmity between these two camps has apparently cooled. This weekend, people who believed Bigfoot was a physical creature and those who believed he was an interdimensional being happily rubbed shoulders. Johnson has come down on the supernatural side. He told us that Sasquatches appear at power spots: places where things pass between two worlds.

“Am I blowing your mind too much here, or are we OK?” he asked the crowd. People cheered back their assent. He played us some recordings he had collected of “probable Sasquatch calls”, ape-like roars and screeching. Then he told us that Sasquatches “apport” gifts to people, which are tailored to the recipient, leaving things like feathers or zippers from jeans near people’s homes to impart a message of some kind. We heard that one time Johnson left a silly putty egg toy outside, and a Sasquatch came in the night and put a bead inside it, as well as some “sebum” — Sasquatch handprints leave a waxy deposit that degrades surfaces, such as car paint, “at a molecular level”. It is challenging to suspend one’s disbelief in the face of statements like, “If you go looking for Sasquatch, eventually a mystery will happen with orbs,” but I did my best.

“My audience is getting smaller and smaller,” Johnson said affably, “but this is Bigfoot, it’s all this. It’s the kitchen sink.”

Just after six o’clock, there was a Sasquatch call contest. The person who could do the best imitation of a Sasquatch call would win a pack of Tannerite, a brand of explosive targets used for shooting practice. Some contestants offered a kind of lupine howling, others a roar. A shirtless man with a pistol in a holster slung around the top of his jeans and an unpredictable, threatening energy went up and gave a loud, impassioned, bawl. This was the man who won the explosives, which I couldn’t help but feel was a suboptimal outcome.

That night, I got into my sleeping bag and felt weird. People really believed in this thing. Thousands of people, across decades, have reported seeing or hearing something they couldn’t explain and the profound effects it had on them. I was apparently the sort of person that was inclined to believe that every single one of those experiences could be explained away by something mundane. Did that make me sensible or close-minded? I felt instinctively sure that I didn’t believe in Bigfoot, despite all these people mounting their cases that it exists. But I also felt disappointed in myself, for not being able to entertain the possibility of stranger and more wonderful things on earth.

When Peter joined me in the tent a little later, he looked perturbed in the light of our camping lamp. “Do you want to hear what I just heard? I’m not sure that you do.”

As Peter had been walking back to our camp, a man intercepted him with a warning. Just moments before, the man, who was named Josh, had seen a Sasquatch up in the forest on the other side of the river, its eyes blazing through the trees. He was worried about our safety, in a tent right next to the water, and said that he would be sleeping in his truck instead of his own tent that night.

“Was he fucking with you?” I asked Peter.

“I don’t think so, no.”

For people who think Bigfoot is real, what does that belief mean to them? What is its appeal as an answer to mysterious phenomena?

I found Josh the next day. He was wearing a camo shirt, a camo cap and camo flip-flops, and seemed happy to elaborate on what he’d told Peter the night before.

“I see a pair of eyes, making a straight line,” he said, then made a laser noise, “like a rope, across there.” He also apparently saw two “juvenile Sasquatches” milling about right by our tent.

Josh had his first meeting with what he believes was a Bigfoot as a child in the wilderness of Alaska. He and his brother saw a bipedal creature with matted fur, long fingers and red eyes, about nine foot tall, grabbing fish out of a creek and feasting on them. Another time, near Alaska’s Talkeetna Mountains, he told me he met a similar creature deep in the forest. Josh “took a knee” to show deference, but the creature ran off. After a further unsettling encounter in the forest with a pile of hundreds of moose bones, Josh stopped going out into the wilderness. “It wasn’t about camping any more. It was about assessing the risk of just being in a forest alone.”

I didn’t get the sense that Josh was consciously bullshitting me. He seemed afraid. Josh lives outside Portland these days with his wife, who works for Adobe, while he looks after their son. Living as they do now in a house that backs on to forest, he came to the festival to try to face his fears of Bigfoot. “But normally, I’m not trying to engage with them, because although they’re very human, they’re just so primal.”

Greenwaters Park is at the top of a trailhead that leads out into the forest over the bridge next to our tent. Peter and I went for a walk. The forests on this coast have a remarkable preponderance of weird shapes in them. Oregon pines grow in endearingly wonky ways, with surprising tilts of their crowns and branches like arms at odd angles, no two trees alike. And the moss-covered trunks in these temperate rainforests might look like hairy creatures if you were feeling spooked and credulous at night. We turned back when we reached a road that ran through the trees, a road at precisely the spot that Josh had pointed out to show where he saw the Bigfoot’s eyebeams.

Am I blowing your mind too much here, or are we OK?

There were more attendees at the festival on this second day, and I set out to meet some of them, while a band called Alien Echo filled the time until the next talks began with some light butt rock. There were people, like Steve, who didn’t want to talk about what they’d seen. “It’s because of the criticism,” he said. “That, and the next question is: where? I’m not gonna tell you that because I don’t want you to bother him.” And there were people who did want to talk. I met Patty and Eric, a couple in their sixties with a sophisticated camping set-up attached to their Jeep. Eric has had three Bigfoot encounters during his lifetime, two here in Oregon and one in Colorado.

“The one in Colorado was violent,” he said. He heard, but did not see, a Bigfoot ripping a huge tree right out of the ground near where he was camping. A tree too big for an elk or a moose to have taken down, his hunting experience told him. “In my opinion, they’re a biological entity, a feral human being of some nature,” he said. He’s fairly confident that mainstream science does know about Bigfoot, but the money isn’t there to secure what most people would accept as proof. “I’m absolutely fine with that. I say, leave them alone.”

Patty added: “With scary things like that, people just wanna kill it because they don’t understand.” I heard a number of people over the weekend saying that the government was probably keeping evidence of Bigfoot hidden to prevent people from hunting them, or to avoid the ethical problems that would arise around whether they should be given human rights, or to protect lucrative opportunities for logging and mining in the forests.

I came across Ramon and two hot-looking dogs called Almond and Joy at his campsite close to the stage. He’s not a Bigfooter himself, but his wife Heidi and her mother Cindy are into it. He took me over to meet them, sitting under a marquee. Cindy and her husband hear a lot of Bigfoot howls in a spot where they go Jeeping near Lake Tahoe. “I had fun with Bigfoot when I was younger. I thought, what a cute legend. Now that I’ve actually experienced it, it’s real. I know it is.” She showed me her own pixelated photo of a dark shape between the trees. We got to talking about the dense wilderness around us. “We have so much forest that’s unexplored,” said Heidi. “There’s lots of things that happen out there, your eyes see something that the brain can’t comprehend, and people are afraid to even say anything.”

Folks are a little odd in the Pacific Northwest. Not in a kooky, “Keep Portland Weird” kind of way, but in a way shaped by the environment. There’s a lean towards the strange and the unexplained in many you meet here. While I was buying a sandwich in nearby Cottage Grove, I told the woman behind the counter about the festival, and she recounted an encounter her friends had had in the forest with a very tall, grey humanoid figure with no face. Other locals had their own stories, things they’d seen or heard moving around in the undergrowth. People spend a lot of time outside here. When it’s this beautiful, why wouldn’t you? And so this is a land of campfire stories, tall tales and wonder at the vast expanses of nature and what it might contain.

When the experts weren’t giving their talks, they were available to chat to punters. I found Jason Kenzie near a stand selling Bigfoot comic books, a tanned man with dyed blond hair in a short-sleeve safari shirt he had unbuttoned further than most would to reveal a sort of tribal silver necklace. Kenzie has made 14 documentaries and counting about Bigfoot. When he first started his research four years ago, he was “20 per cent a believer”. Now, he’s up to 50 per cent. His first encounter was while camping in the forest in Michigan, where he was approached by a creature that huffed in his ear, and a recording device picked up what sounded like protohuman speech. He’s doing an expedition alongside the festival, going out into the forest at night to document any Bigfoot activity.

“I have two rules if you come out with me,” he said. “One is no hoaxing, at all. I want it to be real. The second rule is: if something happens, don’t run. Stay in a group. Then the chances of them attacking you, and it could be an actual bear or a cougar, are very slim. We go in together, we die together.”

On balance, he doesn’t buy the supernatural angle. “People say it can jump through portals, or it can turn invisible. But there’s a whole bunch of Bigfoot people out there looking for Bigfoot to shoot it. So why would [a Bigfoot] ever want to come out of being invisible, if they could be invisible? It’s a question I have.”

The second rule is: stay in a group. We go in together, we die together

Weekend camping tickets for Sasquatch Summer Fest cost $100 per person. But I didn’t get the sense that the experts were making much money out of all this. I met another of the speakers, Chad Datema, a very tall, thin man wearing a pair of techie, woodsman sunglasses. He works in construction to fund his Bigfooting hobby. He doesn’t make a penny doing it, in fact it costs him thousands of dollars a year. “Because I love doing it,” he said, “and I love the camaraderie with the people we meet.”

Cliff Barackman, who runs the North American Bigfoot Center, opened the floor to questions from the audience. One woman asked him whether the Oakridge area was “pretty squatchy,” to which the answer was “Yes.” Another wanted to know if they migrate seasonally (they don’t, but they may move to higher elevation in the summer). But this was also a chance for the sceptics to speak out. One young man stood up and asked one of the biggest questions: why haven’t we ever found a Sasquatch body, one that has died of natural causes in the woods? Barackman had an answer. We don’t find naturally dead bears or mountain lions much, apparently. It depends on the time of year, but in forests like these ones, a dead mammal can completely decompose in a matter of weeks, bones and all. “And animals hide themselves away when they’re going to die. They go to bed, as we do.”

Regrettably, Doug Meacham, an expert in using hypnosis to unlock suppressed memories of Bigfoot, had to cancel at the last minute. In Meacham’s place, we had a man called Ronnie Roseman, which was only fitting really as his interest in Bigfoot was the reason we were all sat there sweating in a municipal park. The festival was organised by his daughter, Priscilla Davidson.

For Priscilla, Bigfoot is the family business. She and her daughter run a property company called Bigfoot’s Real Estate in Oakridge. Her dad Ronnie was great friends with Peter Byrne, one of the “Four Horsemen of Sasquatchery”, a group of legendary Bigfoot hunters. He died last year. “It’s amazing that I was able to bring all these people together,” she told me, “but it’s because of who my dad is.” She reckons Bigfoot is a species of ape. “We would be the only continent to not have an ape. So why not?”

The lack of definitive proof of Bigfoot’s existence doesn’t bother her. In fact, she prefers it that way. “I wouldn’t want one ever discovered. I wouldn’t want the forest shut down because there’s an endangered species out there,” she said.

I wasn’t the only one thinking this stuff through. As Davidson and I spoke, Ronnie was on stage talking about his theory that many people who have seen paranormal things have had traumatic experiences in their life. He believed that there might be a connection there. Perhaps Bigfoot appears to those who need to see him, or need to see something, to make sense of themselves.

It seemed to me that Bigfooting was about the pursuit of knowledge, comradeship, the allure of mystery and facing the elements. But to assert that you know about something most people do not, through your own experiences and expeditions, might also be about something else. “To proclaim Bigfoot’s existence,” wrote Blu Buhs of the mid-century Sasquatch hunters, “was to insist upon one’s dignity against a world that either denied it, or, worse, went on spinning about its axis as though dignity did not even matter, as though the world was nothing but gewgaws and shopping and TV.” Much has changed about America in the past 50 years, but I reckon the impulses he described, to claim one’s power and intellect in a world that might not recognise that you have any, have not.

And in the absence of a concrete answer to what might or might not live deep in North America, Bigfoot means what you want him to mean. Is he savage? Is he benevolent? Is he of this world or out of it? Is he to be protected or hunted? Feared or befriended? The answer is in the eye of the beholder. To look at Bigfoot is to see yourself reflected, your attitude to the (super)natural world and to civilisation on its flipside. As we were listening to a talk about the eerie qualities of the infrared sounds that Bigfoot might be able to produce, a woman sat behind me turned to her friend. “All of this is about creation,” she said. “It’s about how amazing God is.”

On the second night, Peter and I decided it was time to get out of our own heads and into the wild. We set off over the bridge and into the woods, without torches, to see what the forest had to show us. Shortly after we entered the woods, however, we saw flashlights dancing among the trees. It was the Bigfoot experts and some taggers-on, heading back from their own hunt. They didn’t see one, they told us, but they did see some tree branches in an odd structure, which they thought might have been set that way intentionally. They wished us luck.

We walked deeper into the forest, listening keenly to insects chirping and the crunch of our own footfall, and straining our eyes at the gloom as they acclimatised to the dark. It was irrational but it was inarguable: I was afraid. There is something in the body that clenches against darkness and wilderness combined. Peter wondered self-critically whether he would ever be able to be in nature at night and not feel fear. It felt like a failing, being afraid. Was I afraid I was going to see a nine-foot humanoid out there in the woods, not even half a mile from a major highway? Not really. But “Bigfoot” might be one possible name for the fear that there is something lurking in places we are not supposed to be.

There was nothing there. Or rather, there were plenty of things, but very little that two city-dwellers knew how to interpret. But there is an appeal in the idea that, while we have fallen out of step with nature, there is a version of humanity that hasn’t. That there was a fork in the road of man that down one path led to us, with our cities and wars and waste, and down the other led to Bigfoot. That there is an alternate universe, sat right alongside ours, in which mankind never left the garden.

As Peter and I packed up the car the next morning, I noticed a figure standing at the edge of the park. It was Josh. He had his feet apart, his hands on his hips, and he was staring out into the forest on the other side of the river. He had the air of a man on guard. Watchful, with fear, but also with tentative hope, for signs that somewhere out there, something was watching him, too.

Follow @FTMag to find out about our latest stories first and subscribe to our podcast Life and Art wherever you listen