The cryptozoological phenomenon Bigfoot is normally associated with the Pacific Northwest, but Pennsylvania is an unlikely hotbed of sightings — so it makes sense that director of the Pennslyvania Bigfoot Society Eric Altman of West Hempfield Township can bring so many would-be fellow researchers to the area for the Pennsylvania Bigfoot Camping Adventure.
The two-day event has been happening in its current form on and off since 2016 and will be held this year at Benners Meadow Run Camping and Cabins in Farmington from Sept. 6 and 7.
Participants may get to gain some firsthand experiences of their own.
According to Matt Moneymaker, president of the Bigfoot Field Researchers Organization and host of the long-running Animal Planet series “Finding Bigfoot,” a reported encounter with the elusive cryptid from very close to home just came in Aug. 15.
“It’s only a few hundred yards from one from the fall of 2022,” he said in an interview. The encounter occurred on the Ghost Town Trail between Nanty Glo and Ebensburg in Cambria County.
Moneymaker, who resides in Orange County, Calif., said a mother and daughter who frequently hike this trail described smelling a distinctive “odor” at one point on their recent hike, as well as noting the absence of animal sounds in places where they would normally be audible. They also had a strong feeling of being watched at one drinking water spring on the trail.
“At this stage, I would just put this up as a Class B report, which could all just be coincidences and emotions. But they get back to their car and something throws this big rock — they described it as a boulder — that landed within 10 feet away from one of them,” he said.
The Bigfoot Field Researchers Organization was founded in 1995 and lists 127 total Bigfoot sightings from Pennsylvania on its website. The Pennsylvania Bigfoot Society has published significantly more dating to the 1960s.
Interest in sighting a Sasquatch has hit new heights in recent years, according to Moneymaker. In Western Pennsylvania, the upcoming Pennsylvania Bigfoot Camping Adventure weekend will bring together enthusiasts from the local area and beyond to learn about investigating this mysterious — and heavily disputed — creature.
What is Bigfoot?
“Well, first thing to understand: It’s not a him, it’s a them. There’s more than one,” Moneymaker said.
Polarizing academic Dr. Jeffrey Meldrum, a professor of anatomy and anthropology at Idaho State University, agrees: If Bigfoot exists, it’s a species, not an individual.
Legends of hairy, larger-than-life man-apes have existed all over the world for centuries. This includes Native Americans, especially in the Pacific Northwest in the United States and Canada. While reports of encounters with huge, apelike bipedal creatures are scattered throughout history, the modern “Bigfoot boom” really began in the middle of the 20th century.
In 1958, a work crew reported finding massive, humanoid footprints on a road construction site in Humboldt County, Calif. The subsequent news story in the Humboldt Times is the source of the “Bigfoot” name, and it’s stuck ever since. Unfortunately for true believers, after crew member Ray Wallace’s death in 2002, his family revealed that he’d used carved wooden feet to stomp the tracks into the ground, according to the Los Angeles Times.
Not far from that first report, the most famous entry into the Bigfoot canon was filmed less than a decade later. The Patterson–Gimlin film was taken near Bluff Creek in northern California in 1967 and has been heavily scrutinized by skeptics. The blurry, low-quality footage appears to show a large, bipedal creature covered in dark hair stalking through a wooded area.
Both Moneymaker and Altman, executive director of the Pennsylvania Bigfoot Society, got hooked on the legend thanks to films and docudramas made in the 1970s.
This childhood fascination led to both Moneymaker and Altman doing plenty of research and, as they got older, their own investigations. And they’re not the only ones.
Moneymaker reported that the Bigfoot Field Researchers Organization has a network of nearly 3,000 investigators in the United States and Canada. Altman has been organizing Bigfoot-related conferences and camping weekends since 2000, and they’ve routinely drawn crowds of 300 to 1,000 cryptozoologists.
But really … what is Bigfoot?
If Bigfoot exists — an enormous “if”; scientific consensus still says no — there are a couple of theories about the origin of the species.
Meldrum has gained media attention, and drawn some fire from his academic colleagues, for how seriously he touts the idea of a bipedal primate that human observers would recognize as a Sasquatch.
“I see it as just another element of the ecology. I don’t see any rationale or justification to imbue it with extraordinary abilities, which is the popular point of view that has been adopted by many people as a result of their own subjective experience or frustration by the lack of conclusive evidence to demonstrate the existence of a questionable flesh-and-blood biological organism,” Meldrum said.
Meldrum, Moneymaker and Altman all gave similar descriptions of what they believe a Bigfoot would look like: very tall, between 6½ and 9 feet in height; weighing between 700 and 1,300 pounds; and covered in hair or fur from head to toe, with the exception of the palms of the hands, bottoms of the feet and thinner hair on the face.
“Very muscular, a very wide build — kind of like an Arnold Schwarzenegger build,” Altman said.
Moneymaker said he believes there’s a substantial height difference between male and female Sasquatches. Meldrum notes they don’t appear to manufacture tools or build shelters and that they would likely have an omnivorous diet, eating nuts, berries, and deer and elk when the opportunity arises.
So where’s the evidence?
Well, that’s where things get really hairy.
“As of yet, we have no specimen to say definitively that this is what we’re talking about,” said Dr. Melanie Good, a professor at the University of Pittsburgh who authored and teaches an educational module about detecting pseudo-science.
The absence of any kind of concrete Bigfoot — alive or dead — is in itself conclusive until proven otherwise. Live Science also pointed out, in a 2022 article, that “With the rise of high-quality cameras in smartphones, photographs … have gotten sharper and clearer over the years; Bigfoot is a notable exception. The logical explanation for this discrepancy is that the creatures don’t exist and that photographs of them are merely hoaxes or misidentifications.”
Good said eyewitness reports are notoriously unreliable and subject to cognitive biases.
“With Bigfoot, maybe you saw something that was really just an optical illusion or shadow, trick of the light, or maybe you heard something and it was some other creature. Maybe there’s not one explanation that has to cover all of the bases,” she said.
Meldrum has taken many casts of footprints that he believes belong to Sasquatches, starting in southeastern Washington in 1996. “When I was given the opportunity to examine footprints in the ground — fresh, firsthand, a remarkable case with 35, 45 clear footprints in the mud strung out along the length of this access road — it was pretty stunning and it became very real,” he said.
Moneymaker’s most compelling piece of evidence is a recording he took in 1994 called the “Ohio howl recording.” It was taken in the hills of Wellsville, Ohio. He claims it is a large male Bigfoot howling.
He also doesn’t find video evidence as compelling because of the widespread use of AI and CGI to create video hoaxes.
Altman has cast several footprints of his own, and even sent his casts and photographs to Meldrum, including one found in April in Hollidaysburg.
“He was pretty convinced that it’s about 75 to 80% legit, it’s coming from an actual primate, not a stomper on the ground,” Altman said. “The physical evidence is much more compelling to me.”
The investigation continues in Western Pennsylvania
Altman is looking forward to this year’s Pennsylvania Bigfoot Camping Adventure.
“I thought it might be kind of neat for people to actually get hands-on and learn how to do things if they’re interested in the subject. They can hear the researchers talk about their evidence and experience … but they can also learn how to make a footprint cast or what equipment and tools are needed for research or find out how to take measurements, collect evidence, data, that sort of thing,” he said.
Attendees will have the opportunity to talk to researchers, attend workshops, and even do a little searching on their own with night hikes. Ticket proceeds go to local charities.
Altman loves getting to meet like-minded people, and even bring a new generation into the field. “This is a great way for kids if they have this interest. … I know it’s a pseudoscience, but it’s still using scientific techniques and learning about nature, wildlife and all that,” Altman said.
Bigfoot may elude scientists and investigators alike, but the search is still on and growing all the time. To catch a couple of days of the action, get tickets to the Pennsylvania Bigfoot Camping Adventure at pabigfootcampingadventure.com.
Alexis Papalia is a TribLive staff writer. She can be reached at apapalia@triblive.com.
