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What is Bigfoot?
The term sasquatch, for the North American primate under consideration
in this website, is an anglicized derivative of the word "S,squac",
meaning "wild man". The original word, in the St¢:lo
dialect of the Halkomelem language, is used by the Coast Salish
Indians of the Fraser Valley and parts of Vancouver Island,
British Columbia. Indian tribes across North America have a
total of more than sixty different terms for the sasquatch.
Bigfoot was a journalistic term generated in the middle of
the last century during a rash of sightings in Northern California;
its use is not unreasonable since the species has proportionally
much bigger feet than those of human beings and, furthermore,
the word has come to be recognized widely. A goodly selection
of fanciful terms have been used by pioneers and later non-native
inhabitants of North America for the occasional published
and repeated encounters with sasquatches.
The description given here is derived from a compilation
of thousands of eye witness reports from the entire continent,
some of astounding length, detail, and corroborative evidence;
the Patterson movie, taken in 1967, and a recent computer-based
image analysis of it; and statistical analysis of a large
database accumulated over the last fifty years, primarily
by John Green. For the sake of brevity, the description will
not be couched in the customary cautionary terminology with
the usual weasel words. Hence, the seemingly dogmatic style
of the text is used only in the interest of terseness and
it should be leavened by reference to the literature cited
at the end of this article.
This discussion refers to the state of knowledge as of February
2002.
W. H. Fahrenbach, 2002
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