Most people associate the word "Bigfoot" or "Sasquatch" with the fictional character seen on the cover of grocery store tabloid newspapers. Most people are not aware that the fictional tabloid character is based on an ancient and unusual Native American legend describing a rare, nocturnal species of primates. The legend is unusual because it is the only animal legend which is present in the oral histories of nearly every Native American tribe across the continent.
"Bigfoot research," which first began in the late 1950's, is primarily the inquiry as to whether thousands of credible modern eyewitnesses are actually seeing a surviving species of giant primate known to have existed, but widely assumed to be extinct. Bigfoot research also explores the question of why no remains have been recognized by the scientific community, and why so little photographic documentation exists, to contrast with the thousands of credible eyewitness reports that defy any other reasonable explanation.
The most controversial aspect of the entire bigfoot / sasquatch topic stems from the confusion surrouding the term "bigfoot". First coined in the late 1950's, the public is now more familiar with the fictional solitary "Bigfoot" character of those goofy, grocery store tabloids. Yet people who have sightings of the real animals in the wild almost always use the term "bigfoot" to describe what they have seen, mainly because no other word in our popular vocabulary represents the appearance of these animals better, unfortunately. To add to the confusion, the term "bigfoot," even as used by bigfoot researchers, sometimes means both the singular and the plural form, like the word "deer". As a consequence the public often assumes that "Bigfoot research" is the tongue-in-cheek pursuit of a solitary, fictional tabloid character. Nothing could be further from the truth.
The serious scientific investigators probing the topic view it as a fascinating, unsolved natural mystery. For some intellectuals the most interesting aspect is society's reaction to the topic, and the common logic for why it just could not be, and how that logic exposes Americans' fantastically skewed, "English garden" perception of our uninhabited spaces, and the popular ignorance about how much uninhabited space there still is around us in the North, South, East and West. Some intellectuals note how most Americans will admit a belief in God and Jesus, but the same people will quickly ridicule honest eyewitnesses to these animals. Sadly, there is no shortage of ignorant folks out there who understand the subject only from the tabloid angle. Many simply do not have the mental capacity to grasp the scientific angle or the various intellectual aspects.
It's important to understand that the word "Bigfoot" means different things to different people, depending upon how much they know about the subject. People who are little more than grocery store customers laugh at the word "Bigfoot." Many historians, scientists, and intellectuals know more of the background and therefore understand it on a different level. Something to ponder is whether this extreme diversity of perceptions and attitudes about the word "Bigfoot" is perhaps the underlying reason for why this subject is still a "mystery."
