There have been a limited number of formal scientific studies of Bigfoot or Sasquatch, the supposed ape-like creature said to live in North America, and a small number of scientists have examined the evidence.
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Zoologist Ivan T. Sanderson’s book Abominable Snowmen: Legend Comes To Life[1] and his articles on mysterious animals, some appearing in the Saturday Evening Post, were aimed at popular audiences. Grover Krantz characterizes Sanderson’s writing as "'enthusiastic' ... reporting data from a variety of sources with what seemed to be little concern for consistency or verification," an approach which "certainly lowered his credibility in the eyes of the few scientists who read his work".[2] Sanderson’s book remains notable as perhaps the first book-length survey of enigmatic "hairy hominids", and certainly helped popularize Bigfoot and the Yeti. Sanderson also interviewed Roger Patterson and Bob Gimlin four months after the filming of the Patterson-Gimlin film in 1968 February issue of Argosy magazine. In his last year of life, Sanderson gave up on conventional explanations and adopted a paranormal view of Bigfoot.[3]
The first scientific study of available evidence was primatologist John Napier's Bigfoot: The Yeti and Sasquatch in Myth and Reality [4] published in 1973. It offers an even-handed and sympathetic examination of the subject. While giving high marks to some earlier researchers ("Ivan T. Sanderson and John Green and René Dahinden... have made a far better job of recording the major events of the sasquatch saga than I could ever hope to do"),[5] Napier also wrote that if we are to form a conclusion based on scant extant "'hard' evidence," science must declare "Bigfoot does not exist."[6]
Yet this conclusion is qualified, as Napier seemed willing to leave the question unresolved. He found it difficult to entirely reject thousands of alleged tracks, "scattered over 125,000 square miles” or to dismiss all "the many hundreds" of eyewitnesses. He also adds that "if one track is genuine and one report is true-bill, then myth must be chucked out the window and reality admitted through the front door."[7] In the end, Napier writes, "I am convinced that Sasquatch exists, but whether it is all it is cracked up to be is another matter altogether. There must be something in north-west America that needs explaining, and that something leaves man-like footprints."[8]
In 1974, the National Wildlife Federation funded a field study, seeking Bigfoot evidence. No formal federation members were involved, and the study made no notable discoveries.[9]
The 1975 The Gentle Giants: The Gorilla Story was co-authored by Geoffrey H. Bourne, another primatologist. Its final chapter is a brief summary of various mystery primate reports worldwide. Like Napier, he laments the dearth of physical evidence, but does not dismiss Sasquatch or Yeti as impossible.
From May 10-May 13, 1978, the University of British Columbia hosted a symposium: Anthropology of the Unknown: Sasquatch and Similar Phenomena, a Conference on Humanoid Monsters. Presented were 35 papers (abstracts collected in Wasson, 141-154). Most attendees came from anthropology backgrounds, and Pyle writes that the conference "brought together twenty professors in various fields, along with several serious laymen, to consider the mythology, ethnology, ecology, biogeography, physiology, psychology, history and sociology of the subject. All took it seriously, and while few, if any, accepted the existence of Sasquatch outright, they jointly concluded 'that there are not reasonable grounds to dismiss all the evidence as misinterpretation or hoax.'"[10] Some papers presented at the symposium were collected in 1980 as Manlike Monsters on Trial: Early Records and Modern Evidence, edited by Marjorie Halpin and Michael Ames.
Beginning in the late 1970s, physical anthropologist Grover Krantz achieved a degree of notoriety as probably the leading academic to devote considerable effort to the subject. Krantz published several articles and four book-length treatments of Sasquatch.
Robert Michael Pyle's 1997 book Where Bigfoot Walks: Crossing the Dark Divide, as much a survey of Bigfoot’s cultural impact as of the likelihood of the creature’s reality, was researched and written with a grant from the Guggenheim Foundation. Pyle, author of Wintergreen, the acclaimed 1987 requiem for the forests of Washington's Willapa Hills, is an ecologist and nature writer.
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