What happened
In the summer of 1958, workers building a road through the forests of Six Rivers National Forest in northern California began finding huge, human-like footprints around their machines. In August, bulldozer operator Jerry Crew came across lines of them in the mud – each print measured about 40 cm. His co-workers told of similar tracks at other construction sites and of a fuel drum weighing about 200 kg that had been moved, and they began calling the culprit “Bigfoot.” Crew made a plaster cast and contacted journalist Andrew Genzoli of the “Humboldt Times.” In early October 1958, a photo of Crew with the cast appeared on the newspaper's front page, and Genzoli's articles popularized the name Bigfoot throughout the United States.
Witnesses
Jerry Crew and other workers building the road in the Bluff Creek valley.
Explanations and hypotheses
In 2002, after the death of Ray Wallace, who was connected with the road construction, his family displayed a pair of carved wooden feet and stated that he had faked the tracks – partly to scare thieves away from the construction site. Wallace was said to have been inspired by pranksters from Toledo, Washington, who had made similar tracks as early as the 1930s. Some Bigfoot researchers dispute this explanation, noting that not all the Bluff Creek prints match the feet shown, but most consider the case a hoax.
Hoax A proven or admitted hoax.
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