#bigfoot — Public Fediverse posts
Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #bigfoot, aggregated by home.social.
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#PhotoOfTheDay is an oldie of the Legend of Bigfoot, although Bigfoot doesn't look very happy about it! 😆
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Bigfoot Spotted • Jefferson, Texas, USA
Rolleiflex 3.5 E2 • Kodak Tri-X 400 • 2026
#FilmPhotography #Kodak #TriX #Camera #Film #Photography #MediumFormat #Rolleiflex #BWfilm #Monochrome #TX #Jefferson #Texas #Bigfoot #Statue #Forest #Outdoors #July_12_2026
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Impronte inesplicabili a Sumatra e l’intrigante possibilità dell’orango umano
https://www.jacoporanieri.com/blog/?p=44685#criptidi #creature #animali #primati #scimmie #teorie #ipotesi #indonesia #sumatra #dalmondo #folklore #credenze #miti #scienza #ricerca #leggende #bigfoot #orango #società #popolazioni #villaggi #giungla #foresta #biologia
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Mountain Calling "Hiking through the mountains hunting for Bigfoot wasn't her idea of a great time, but a paycheck was a paycheck" Sale: $3.99 to FREE by Janice Whiteaker Rating: 4.4/5 (1,726 Reviews) #romance #paranormal #werewolves #shifters #mountain #bigfoot #smalltown #booksky #books #free
Mountain Calling -
🚨BREAKING NEWS🚨: People believe fake images! 🤯 Apparently, if you slap a picture of #Bigfoot on a grainy photo, the world goes bananas. 🍌 Next time, try reading the *actual* article instead of just ogling the pretty pixels. 📸🙄
https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2025/apr/12/28-fake-images-that-fooled-the-world #fakeimages #misinformation #criticalthinking #newsmedia #socialmedia #HackerNews #ngated -
Pop Cryptid Spectator 8
Welcome to the Pop Cryptid Spectator no. 8. This edition illustrates more examples of how cryptids are an integral part of culture, if you are in town, in the woods, on or offline.
In this edition:
- Bigfoot proposed as California’s official cryptid
- Monster Snap VR Game
- What is a “cryptoid”?
- Fakelore to folklore: The Rake
Bigfoot proposed as California’s official cryptid
The big(foot) news this week was the introduction of a bill in the California Assembly to name Bigfoot as an the official cryptid of California. On February 14, 2025, Chris Rogers (Democrat) proposed bill AB 666*:
Existing law establishes the state flag and the state’s emblems, including, among other things, the golden poppy as the official state flower and the California redwood as the official state tree.
This bill would state the intent of the Legislature to enact legislation that would designate Bigfoot as the official state cryptid.
*Bigfoot could be the “mountain or wood devil” if you are predisposed to never seeing a coincidence.
Some people didn’t respond positively to the news, noticing that California has more important things to attend to right now and in the foreseeable future. But state legislators are overly fond of such memorial acts, and regularly waste time pushing them through. California already has 42 official state symbols. Why not another one? The symbolic gestures provide recognition and anchors the symbols to the state.
Rogers’ represents the Northern part of the state that is heavily associated with Bigfoot and benefits already from the link. Humboldt County includes Bluff Creek, the location of the infamous Patterson-Gimlin film from 1967, and nearby Willow Creek, home of huge Bigfoot Daze festival. Willow Creek was the place where Bigfoot supposedly made its historic entrance into American popular culture when in 1958, loggers found giant footprints that were reported in the local Humboldt Times, giving the unknown creature the name “Bigfoot”.
Therefore, it does make sense that Rogers’ would like to cement this notoriety. The effort clearly is intended to encourage tourism from those people who believe, or just really want to believe, the forest still hides a mysterious creature that, like some supernatural being, has remained hidden and magical. Rogers’ noted that Bigfoot “generates buzz and interest from outdoor enthusiasts,” more so than other cryptids. He’s not wrong.
Washington and Oregon, however, may have a beef about it, but there is no reason why Bigfoot can’t also be their official cryptid. Heck, Bigfoot or its relations have been reported spotted in every US state with the possible exception of Hawaii. Bigfoot is the top US, for sure.
More from SF Gate and from the SF Chronicle.
Monster Snap VR game
A new virtual reality game coming in 2026 promises to give you a chance to collect photo evidence of cryptids. Monster Snap maroons you in the Bermuda Triangle where mysterious secrets are hidden. (Gosh, this is SO OLD. But I guess having a bunch of mysterious secrets existing in a single named location is convenient.) You can also encounter Bigfoot and spot Nessie. For PC-VR and Meta Quest 2 & 3.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JYMAgt6k8q0
What is a “cryptoid”?
If you peruse online cryptid content, you may sometimes see the term “cryptoid”. It struck me as a possibly useful term to distinguish between sci-cryptids (those viewed with a zoological lens) and the fantastical or folkloric version of cryptids (such as mermaids, dragons, shapeshifters, jackalopes, etc.). So I took a look into where the term might have come from and how it’s used.
The suffix “-oid” means “similar to” or “likeness”, giving us words like “planetoid”, “humanoid” and “factoid”. It can also be a way to make an interesting derogatory word sometimes referring to a particular ideology or group of people as in “schizoid” or “skeptoid“. Or just a fun suffix for made up things like “graboid“.
According to Loren Coleman, whom I found had addressed the question of the difference between a cryptid and a cryptoid back in 2011, he seems to think it’s mostly a mistaken attempt to mean “cryptid”. In a way, “cryptoid” works when someone is intending a humorous or monstrous description of a mystery creature. But it will be confusing if not consistently used that way.
“Cryptoid phenomena” was a term used by Emile Boirac beginning around 1918 to refer to hidden psychic abilities. Later, it also comes up as the term “cryptoID”, which can ruin your search results. But there are a few books in the 2000s that intentionally use “cryptoid” as a humorous term (as with comics or monster-related art) or simply as a strange error by self-published writers who didn’t have an editor. (Worse than that, some even more careless will use “crypoids” [sic].) Unless it’s used in a more deliberate sense, it seems to be an indicator that the user isn’t well versed on “cryptids”.
A graph of “cryptoid” use per decade. The 1920s represents the Boirac references. The use is also creeping up since the 2000s.Finallly, “Cryptoid” is an official trademarked name of a pyrethroid insecticide. (There’s the -oid again, meaning similar to the natural pesticide pyrethrum.) The trademark makes me jettison the nub of an idea to use the word to mean cryptid-like.
Hope you enjoyed this rather strange etymology lesson.
P.S. Remember the “noid“? Um, on second thought, avoid the noid.
Fakelore to folklore: The Rake
Cryptid Wiki explicitly rejects discussion on “creepypasta monsters such as slenderman, herobrine, the rake”. This is understandable as there is a flood of new creatures invented all the time. To include them would dilute the idea of cryptids. Creepypasta is related to digital transmission of fictional tales. CW also rejects outright fictional characters from books and films as well. While it’s reasonable to mark, say, Cthulhu as an inappropriate cryptid, there are many examples where it’s not easy to draw an objective line.
The Rake is the prime example of a creepypasta creature. The spark was set in motion on 4Chan and then the idea morphed from there. It was formalized, and given a fictional history, in a story from 2009 as a pale hairless humanoid, often spindly in appearance, with small sharp teeth, black voids as eyes, and an unnerving disjointed look, and highly agile way of moving on all fours.
The description and characteristics varied as the stories spread online. It was described similar to slenderman, without a defined face, watching in the background, often in suburban areas. Originally described as a “crawler”, it acquired the name “rake” a bit later and eventually was associated with shapeshifters and “fleshgaits”, as a generally unpleasant entity. It also is not that far from depictions of modern aliens. The lore has grown and evolved online and, as such, I currently can’t find a great resource for the Rake. As time goes on, you can see overlap and blending of creatures with similar features and stories (pale crawlers, skinwalker, wendigo, etc.), and these all diverge widely from the original tales. The rake continues to grow in popularity and is often listed as a cryptid.
A photo circulated widely in 2010 of a pale crawling creature framed as a “swamp monster” captured on a trail camera in Berwick, Louisiana. It was discussed (however seriously or not) as a real or hoaxed thing in the woods. At the time, my opinion was that it was a manipulated image using a digital model. In a short while, this picture became labeled as a rake and the story of the image in the swamp morphed into other tales as well.
The Berwick incident photo. A hoax that became linked to the rake.A problem arises when creepypasta or “mythical” creatures are seen by people. Long ago, people swore to having real experiences with fairies and dragons. Today, we have many people attesting that they see werewolves (often in the form of dogmen). There is a popular suggestion that fictional beings are thought into existence; that is, since so many people hear about them and visualize them, they manifest themselves into our reality. This is also known as the tulpa origin of cryptids.
The fictional origins of creepypasta monsters can get lost if they are removed from their original context and are mistaken for genuine eyewitness stories. This video embedded below is a good rundown of the history of the rake, though I have not confirmed the details and dates. (They do sound right, but you might want to ignore most of the visuals.) Also, the title portrays the rake as the “first Internet cryptid” – eh, I’m not buying that as the chupacabra from 1992 and others since may more rightly deserves that title. It is a good explanation of why it’s can be difficult to differentiate the rake as a cryptid.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3x7k4hjDBwU
People claim to encounter the rake, even though it’s fiction. It is unclear if they are telling what they think is the truth or just playing along in a shared manufactured reality. The phenomenon of creepypasta creatures showing up in the real world seems similar to the true story of a made-up April Fools song on a Michigan radio station in 1987 that resulted in a wave of stories from the past and continuing today about the Dogman.
Where can we draw the line for when a fictional creature can exist under the “cryptid” label? Cryptids are liminal creatures, and they deftly pass between the realms of real and fiction. The label is a dependent on the moment in time when people report, and others believe, that the creature could exist in our reality.
Thanks for reading! Send comments, questions, or suggestions to popcryptid(at)proton.me. If you want to send some cryptid plushies or other merch, or books to review, email for my physical mailing address.
For more, click on Pop goes the Cryptid landing page. Make sure you subscribe to all the posts – it’s always free and I don’t send annoying spam.
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#AB666 #Bigfoot #California #cryptoid #Fakelore #MonsterSnap #popCryptid #PopCryptidSpectator #PopGoesTheCryptid #rake
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Modern problems with scientific naming: Example – Bigfoot
An article advanced-published on 14 November 2024 in the Journal of Mammalogy calls out the problem with poor naming practices of proposed new species in our internet age. One of the most famous examples of poor practice was that of Melba Ketchum, et al., who not only did a terrible job analyzing DNA from “Bigfoot” but also used a pop-up journal to give Bigfoot another useless name.
The “Perspective” piece by Ruedas, Norris, and Timm, titled “Best practices for the naming of species“, explains that there are set rules to effectively naming new species. Naming is governed by the International Commission on Zoological Nomenclature (ICZN) based on the 10th edition of Linnaeus’s Systema Naturæ published likely in 1758. Linnaeus’s system of nature called a consistent use of two Greek or Latin words to denote genus and species.
A person who wishes to designate an organism as a new species must publish the name and description according to the rules in the code of the ICZN. But that frequently does not happen as it should leading to “descriptions that fail to meet standards outlined in the Code” that “can create problems for years afterwards, with any number of unfortunate—and often unforeseen—consequences.”
For example, when authors propose new names that fail to meet the standards in the Code, these names are unavailable. They are called “naked names” (singular = nomen nudum; plural = nomina nuda). The description and name is invalid. The real world effect of these errors is that, if we cannot clearly define the organism we are talking about, we can’t effectively study or protect it.
Ruedas, et al. goes on to describe what makes a good naming process. Additionally, they note issues with electronic publications, which are more prevalent now than in… uh… 1758. The ICZN Code addresses that. It might be argued, they say, that an HTML version of the description can never be the version of record because it’s impermanent.
When you don’t have an actual Bigfoot
There is also a problem with not having a holotype specimen when we now have photographic, video, and DNA evidence instead of a collected sample. While it’s not prohibited, things can get messy if you only have a photo or video to document the find. The example given of an “absurd situation” is that of Bigfoot/Sasquatch. I don’t think the paper’s authors were aware of (or maybe they chose not to go down that hole) of the many instances of people proposing names for Bigfoot and other cryptids on a whim and thinking those names would be valid. This happened before that of the infamous Melba Ketchum and her Bigfoot DNA/Sasquatch Genome debacle. But Ketchum was name-checked in this article because, out of all the rules she didn’t follow, she DID register Homo sapiens cognatus with the ZooBank, the official registry of the ICZN. The name is a nomen nudem because it was missing every other requirement, including a description. Not mentioned in the article is the fact that the Denovo journal that she created herself to publish this one paper (after failing to get it into Nature because the science was so bad), has now disappeared from the internet. It no longer exists.
A second example related to Bigfoot is that of the Patterson-Gimlin Film which is the visual of this creature that everyone recognizes, seemingly from childhood. If a name was given to the creature based on this film, and it turned out that it was a man in horsehide suit as suspected, the name would apply possibly either to the man or to the horsehide as a holotype! That spirals even further into nomenclature chaos, but you can read the article if you want to hear what would happen regarding synonyms.
Unsurprisingly, this tactic has been attempted! In 2017, an alternative healer, Dr. Erich Hunter, described and named the animal based on the 1967 film. He self-published a document on CreateSpace calling the creature Kryptopithecus gimlinpattersonorum (Hunter 2017). The document, “Kryptopithecus gimlinpattersoni, A New Species of Bipedal Primate (Primates: Hominidae) From Humboldt County, California USA” (later edited to “gimlinpattersonorum” as noted above), is a legitimate way to declare a species – since it was printed and could be archived. But Hunter couldn’t follow the rules, either. The original species name was “gimlinpattersoni” which appeared on the cover and in the released print/Kindle copy. That is incorrect Latinization and there is no legitimate way to fix it. Sloppy Latin was just one of the problems in this Bigfoot naming ceremony.
Like Ketchum, Hunter registered the name in ZooBank. That makes no difference. The Code or the registration of the name includes no judgment on the validity of the species description or characterization. The ICZN code, however, explicitly prohibits naming hypothetical concepts. Until a part of a body is found and clearly documented by a professional who knows what they are doing, Bigfoot remains hypothetical. No past used name would legitimately apply unless (I think) it could be proven that the previous name was referring to the same creature. Considering all the things out there that are called a Bigfoot, but aren’t, that’s a heavy lift.
Finally, this process reminds me of the ridiculous stunt pulled as part of the Lost Monster Files show where they named a chupacabra by plucking fun, cool words out of the air. That was just idiotic. There have been past attempts to name the Loch Ness Monster and Cadborosaurus, too. Some of those names are still circulating in the cryptid literature today, misleading the audience to assume that such names are valid and represent a creature yet to be captured. Since there is no distinct description of what the creature was (they possibly could have been just a wave or an already named big fish), the suggested name means nothing without the definitive description. Don’t let amateurs play the zoological name game.
#Bigfoot #binomialNomenclature #Cryptozoology #howToNameNewSpecies #ICZN #MelbaKetchum #newSpecies #Sasquatch #science #scientific #scientificName #scientificProcess #zoology
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The list of Cryptid Town Festivals keeps growing! More towns are celebrating their local monsters or cryptid creeps in a very public way. Summer and Fall 2024 brought us several new events to serve as evidence of the Pop Cryptid phenomenon across the US. Building on the success of the Mothman Festival, in particular, communities recognize the value of a monster mascot in their town. Cryptid-themed festivals often follow the general layout and activities made famous by Point Pleasant, with food trucks, vendors, music and speakers, attracting visitors and dollars to the town. Some cryptid attractions are more adult oriented with their beer gardens and grown-up cosplay. Others are family friendly with lots of kids events – because kids LOVE cryptids!
As shown in the examples below, the trend is very much about the storytelling and fun, and has little to do with the original aim of finding mystery animals new to science. We also see the term “cryptid” used ever more broadly and loosely to cover a wide array of weird beings.
Here are some of the latest Pop Cryptid events in small-town USA for 2024:
Green Eyes Festival
New this year is an event in honor of a Civil War era ghoul called “Green Eyes”. After being inspired by the local legend of a glow-eyed creature – more of a ghost than a mystery animal who reportedly prowls the Chickamauga, Georgia battlefield – the organizers used the template set by the world-famous Mothman Festival in West Virginia. The event caught the attention of community leaders. Very much in line with the phenomenon of Pop Cryptids, Chickamauga’s Economic Development and Events Director, Eric Pullen said, “I feel like this is going to create a new image for Chickamauga to a younger generation that primarily sees it as based on civil war history.” The first Green Eyes Festival, that honors the folklore and culture of Northwest Georgia/Southeast Tennessee, is Oct 5, 2024 and includes Green Eyes being awarded the keys to the city of Chickamauga.
Squonkapalooza
Johnstown, Pennsylvania hosted the second annual Squonkapalooza event to celebrate cryptids, particularly the ever-more popular Squonk. The squonk is a made-up creature first noted in the 1910 book Fearsome Creatures of the Lumberwoods by William T. Cox. The squonk is dog-sized and excessively wrinkly, warty and so ugly that it cries constantly and, if caught, will dissolve into a pool of tears. The squonk has been unofficially noted as the “state cryptid of Pennsylvania”, an accolade that would be up for vigorous debate! According to the news report, visitors to the festival this year did seem to consider the squonk as some kind of mystery animal, more akin to the traditional view of cryptids. Maybe they didn’t know the silly backstory. But, more likely, they are just experiencing the Pop Cryptid wave of interest in weird creature tales just for fun.
Bigfoot and the Gateway to the Mysterious
The previous month, some 40 miles or so west of Johnstown, Pennsylvania, Derry Borough mayor Grant Nicely issued a proclamation in August, 2024 to declare Bigfoot as the official cryptid of the borough. Bigfoot is a big deal to folks around Greensburg, Uniontown, and the Chestnut Ridge area. Cryptid sightings, and associated high strangeness, have been reported in the region for decades. In the past few years, thanks to social media and the increasing popularity of strange stories propagating online, the area has become a “a hub for those fascinated by the unexplained.” The proclamation now designates Derry Borough as “The Gateway to the Mysterious Chestnut Ridge” encouraging residents and visitors to explore its mysteries and drop some dough.
Flathead Lake monster sculpture
A sculpture of the Flathead Lake Monster was revealed at the Sacajawea Park in Polson, Montana in September 2024. The Polson Mayor, Eric Huffine, opened the ceremony to unveil the bronze statue, saying there are more than 100 years of stories and legends of the monster from Flathead Lake in Kalispell, also known as Flossie. They are very proud of their own beastie.
Have news of a cryptid festival or monument in your town? Contact [email protected]
https://moderncryptozoology.wordpress.com/2024/10/02/parade-of-cryptids-in-small-town-usa/
#Bigfoot #cryptidFestival #cryptids #Georgia #GreenEyes #lakeMonsters #mascots #monsterLegends #monsters #Montana #MothmanFestival #Pennsylvania #Squonk
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Demoscene: La Linea
Demos aren't necessarily out to wow you by pushing a computer's hardware to its absolute limits. Sometimes one will just present something that was obviously (to people who understand the platform) challenging to do, but is fun for its own sake.La Linea is a series of short films made for televisi
https://setsideb.com/demoscene-la-linea/
#demoscene #niche #animation #bigfoot #breeze #cartoon #demo #demoscene #indie #lalinea #niche #osvaldocavandoli #video #youtube
