Speak the language

Glossary

The field has its own vocabulary, some of it borrowed from primatology, some of it invented on forums at two in the morning. Both kinds are here, marked.

Search terms

Abominable Snowman Media: The press name for the yeti, in circulation since Henry Newman's dispatches of the early 1920s, written under the pen name 'Kim' for The Statesman in Calcutta. It is a journalist's substitution layered on a translation, and the Tibetologist David Snellgrove of the School of Oriental and African Studies argued that the variant spelling 'metch' is impossible in Tibetan, since t, c and h cannot be conjoined in that language. Serious sources prefer 'yeti.'
Almas Folklore: A wildman of Caucasian, Turkic and Mongolian tradition, reported from the Caucasus, the Tian Shan and Pamir mountains of Central Asia, and the Altai of western Mongolia. In 1964 the Soviet historian Boris Porshnev proposed that the accounts described a relict population of Neanderthals; he had taken part in an unsuccessful search expedition in 1958. The Mongolian scholar Byambyn Rinchen noted the same year that 'the origin of the old name is quite unknown ... and it does not lend itself for translation in other languages.'
Anecdote Statistics: Evidence based on descriptions and reports of individual personal experiences or observations, collected in a non-systematic manner. It is the least certain type of scientific literature, with little or no safeguard against fabrication or inaccuracy, and it risks being unreliable through cherry-picking or otherwise non-representative sampling, compounded by the tendency to remember notable or unusual examples. Researchers may use anecdotal evidence to suggest new hypotheses but never as validating evidence, which is why a sightings database, however large, cannot settle the question.
Ape Canyon History: A gorge on the southeast flank of Mount St. Helens, Washington. In the summer of 1924 a group of gold prospectors claimed that 7-foot ape-like animals attacked them with boulders overnight. U.S. Forest Service rangers J. H. Huffman and William Welch investigated and concluded that the miners had probably placed the large stones near the cabin themselves to bolster the tale.
Apophenia Psychology: The tendency to perceive meaningful connections between unrelated things. The psychiatrist Klaus Conrad coined the term in 1958, describing it as the 'unmotivated seeing of connections' accompanied by 'a specific feeling of abnormal meaningfulness.' Pareidolia is one subtype. In a field built on ambiguous photographs, faint audio and irregular sticks, apophenia is the default failure mode rather than an occasional lapse.
BFRO Field jargon: The Bigfoot Field Researchers Organization, founded in 1995, which runs the largest public sightings database and the Class A/B/C classification scheme, and which describes itself as 'the only scientific research organization exploring the bigfoot/sasquatch mystery.' Its founder and president Matt Moneymaker appeared on Finding Bigfoot for the show's full run. The database is a curated collection of reports rather than a record of verified events, which BFRO's own classification notes make plain.
Bigfoot Media: A newspaper name, not a traditional one. In 1958 Jerry Crew, a bulldozer operator for a logging company, found 16-inch humanlike prints sunk in mud in the Six Rivers National Forest, Humboldt County, California; a plaster cast was made, and Crew appeared holding one of the casts on the front page of the Humboldt Times on October 6, 1958, in coverage by columnist Andrew Genzoli that introduced the name 'Bigfoot.' The cast and the photograph are documented facts about a cast and a photograph, not about an animal.
Blobsquatch Field jargon: A blend of 'blob' and 'sasquatch,' generally used humorously, for a humanlike but unfocused, low-resolution shape in a photo or video offered as a sasquatch. Poor-quality images of this kind are commonly attributed to pareidolia. The word is community slang and carries no analytic meaning.
Bluff Creek Field jargon: A tributary of the Klamath River in northern California, about 25 logging-road miles northwest of Orleans. It is the most cited location in the subject: the 1958 track find that produced the word 'Bigfoot' was made in the Six Rivers National Forest in Humboldt County, and the 1967 Patterson-Gimlin film was shot alongside the same drainage.
Bob Heironimus claim Media: On January 30, 1999 Bob Heironimus stated publicly, through a press release, that he had been the figure in the Patterson-Gimlin film. Separately, on August 16, 2002 the costume maker Philip Morris said in a radio interview that he had made a gorilla costume used in the film. Both are named claims by identified people; neither has been corroborated by physical evidence, and defenders of the film dispute both.
Casting artifact Forensics: Surface texture produced by the casting process itself rather than by the foot that made the track. In 2005 Matt Crowley obtained a copy of the 'Onion Mountain Cast' and was able to painstakingly recreate its dermal ridges, showing that the detail offered as proof of a living foot can be generated in the making of a cast. Anyone citing dermal ridges as Bigfoot evidence has to answer that result first.
Class A report Field jargon: A Bigfoot Field Researchers Organization database category, coined by that hobbyist group and used nowhere in science. BFRO defines it as covering reports that 'involve clear sightings in circumstances where misinterpretation or misidentification of other animals can be ruled out with greater confidence.' BFRO states that its scale 'rates the circumstantial potential for misinterpretation, not the credibility of the witness or how interesting the report is.'
Class B report Field jargon: BFRO's category for 'incidents where a possible sasquatch was observed at a great distance or in poor lighting conditions and incidents in any other circumstance that did not afford a clear view of the subject.' The label describes viewing conditions, not evidence quality.
Class C report Field jargon: BFRO's category for 'most second-hand reports, and any third-hand reports, or stories with an untraceable sources,' assigned 'because of the high potential for inaccuracy.' A sightings database sorted this way is a curated collection of accounts, not a record of verified events.
Cripplefoot Field jargon: The name for tracks found in snow at Bossburg, Washington, in December 1969, said to show microscopic dermal ridges and a deformity that the primatologist John Napier tentatively identified as clubfoot. Grover Krantz, then at Washington State University, built biomechanical models from the casts and concluded the prints were left by an animal about 8 feet tall weighing roughly 800 pounds. He published 'Anatomy and Dermatoglyphics of Three Sasquatch Footprints' in Cryptozoology 2(1):53-81 in 1983, the journal of the International Society of Cryptozoology; his sasquatch articles were rejected by peer-reviewed scholarly journals.
Cryptid Field jargon: A creature whose existence is claimed but unconfirmed. The word is recent and community-made: J. E. Wall coined it in the summer 1983 issue of the International Society of Cryptozoology newsletter, proposing it in place of sensational terms like 'monster' for 'creatures which are (or may be) subjects of cryptozoological investigation.' It is a category of claim, not a category of animal.
Cryptozoology History: The search for animals whose existence is not accepted by zoology. It was founded in the 1950s by the Belgian zoologist Bernard Heuvelmans, whose On the Track of Unknown Animals appeared in French in 1955, and the Scottish zoologist Ivan T. Sanderson; the term dates from 1959 or before, and Heuvelmans attributed the coinage to Sanderson. There is a broad consensus among academics that cryptozoology is a pseudoscience, chiefly because it rests on anecdote and does not follow the scientific method.
Dermal ridges Forensics: The friction ridges that produce fingerprints and, in primates, sole prints. Jimmy Chilcutt, a retired Texas latent-print examiner, said that certain Bigfoot casts carried unique dermal ridges proving them genuine; he published nothing to substantiate the claim, and his statements were made through a posting on the internet. Michael Dennett noted in the Skeptical Inquirer that no review of Chilcutt's statements had been performed beyond those by other Bigfoot enthusiasts. See Casting artifact.
Dzunukwa Folklore: A specific figure in Kwakwaka'wakw and Nuu-chah-nulth tradition: a large dark ogress with long pendulous breasts and bedraggled hair who steals children and carries them home in her basket to eat, is barely able to see, and is described as drowsy and dim-witted. She is also venerated as a bringer of wealth, and she has a defined ceremonial role, since at the end of a Kwakwaka'wakw potlatch the host chief appears wearing her mask, the geekumhl, to signal that the ceremony is over. Equating her with Bigfoot erases both the wealth-giving function and the ceremonial position.
eDNA (environmental DNA) Genetics: DNA collected from environmental samples such as soil, sediment, fresh water, seawater, snow or air rather than directly from an organism, shed through feces, mucus, gametes, skin, carcasses and hair. It is genuinely powerful for detecting rare, elusive or cryptic species without capture, which is why it is repeatedly proposed for this subject. Its limits matter here: DNA traces in fresh water and oceans last only a few days, sometimes up to a week, with some stream and inshore studies finding decay to undetectable levels in about 48 hours, and false readings from contamination are a recognized failure mode.
Expectant attention Psychology: A nineteenth-century term for the state in which anticipating a particular result makes a person more likely to produce or perceive it. W. B. Carpenter argued in an 1852 paper, quoted at length by the hypnotism researcher James Braid, that movements of the divining rod and of objects suspended from the finger 'have been clearly proved to depend on the state of expectant attention on the part of the performer,' with the anticipation of a given result acting as the stimulus that involuntarily prompts the muscular movements producing it. It names a mechanism, not an accusation of dishonesty.
Expedition Field jargon: An organized multi-day field outing. The label covers wildly different things: in 1977 Zhou Guoxing led a yeren expedition in Shennongjia for the Chinese Academy of Sciences with military personnel, zoologists, biologists and photographers, a party large enough that the noise it made was later judged counterproductive, while a modern paid weekend outing may involve a dozen hobbyists with recorders. Neither has produced a specimen.
False memory Psychology: Recalling something that did not happen, or recalling it differently from how it happened. Elizabeth Loftus and John Palmer's 1974 paper 'Reconstruction of automobile destruction: An example of the interaction between language and memory' is the standard citation for the effect of question wording on what witnesses report. The Deese-Roediger-McDermott paradigm, developed from James Deese's 1959 work and extended by Henry L. Roediger III and Kathleen McDermott in 1995, reliably produces the same result with word lists: subjects recall a related but absent 'lure' as often as words actually presented, and about half report being sure they heard it. Sincere, consistent, vivid testimony is fully compatible with a memory that formed after the event.
FBI hair analysis History: In 1976 the Bigfoot researcher Peter Byrne sent the FBI fifteen hairs attached to a small skin fragment and asked the bureau to identify them. The FBI replied in 1977 that the hairs were of deer family origin. The file was declassified in 2019 and generated headlines that the FBI had 'investigated Bigfoot'; the interesting fact is documentary, not zoological.
Fouke Monster Folklore: A creature reported around Fouke, Miller County, Arkansas. On May 2, 1971 Bobby and Elizabeth Ford said something reached through a screen window at night while she slept on a couch. Jim Powell of the Texarkana Gazette and Texarkana Daily News covered the case and is credited with the name. The archaeologist Frank Schambach said there is 'a 99 percent chance the tracks are a hoax,' noting that the tracks showed three toes while all primates, including hominids, have five.
Frame 352 Media: The frame of the Patterson-Gimlin film that captures the famous 'look-back,' in which the subject turns its head toward the camera. It falls in the film's steadier middle section and is by far the most reproduced still in the subject.
Game camera Zoology: A camera trap, triggered automatically by a passive infrared sensor or an interrupted infrared beam. Camera traps do document rare species: the black-naped pheasant-pigeon, last documented from a specimen collected in 1896, was photographed by a trail camera on Fergusson Island in September 2022 by Jordan Boersma and colleagues. They also fail in specific ways worth knowing: humidity causes malfunctions and lost data, wind produces false triggers on moving vegetation, and animals topple units or splatter the lens.
Gigantopithecus as Bigfoot Paleontology: The popular claim that Bigfoot is a surviving Gigantopithecus, pushed by Grover Krantz from 1970 until his death in 2002. It is unsupported on its own terms: no leg or pelvic bones are known, so there is no fossil evidence bearing on bipedality; its molecular affinity is with orangutans rather than the human line; and it is dated extinct in southern China hundreds of thousands of years before the claimed North American sightings. Scientists and amateur monster hunters both dismissed Krantz's arguments.
Gigantopithecus blacki Paleontology: A very large extinct ape named by Ralph von Koenigswald in 1935 from molars bought in a Hong Kong drugstore. Only teeth, more than a thousand of them from sites in southern China, and four mandibles are known; there are no postcranial bones at all, so claims about its posture, gait or height rest on inference from jaws rather than on legs. Peptide sequencing of enamel and dentine proteins published in 2019 placed it with orangutans, sharing a common ancestor about 12 to 10 million years ago, and a 2024 Nature study by Yingqi Zhang and colleagues dated its extinction to between 295,000 and 215,000 years ago.
Grassman Folklore: A regional name used in Ohio for a reported hairy hominid. The related 'Minerva Monster' label belongs to alleged sightings around Minerva, in Paris Township, Stark County, Ohio, in August 1978, associated with the Cayton family, and was revived by Seth Breedlove's 2015 documentary Minerva Monster. The names are local and journalistic; no physical evidence distinguishes Ohio reports from reports anywhere else.
Habituation Primatology: In ethology, a form of non-associative learning in which an organism's non-reinforced response to an inconsequential stimulus decreases after repeated or prolonged exposure. Field primatologists use it deliberately: researchers habituated the Kasakela chimpanzees to repeated human presence so that they could record natural behavior rather than reactions to observers. In Bigfoot circles the word has drifted to mean a claimed ongoing relationship between a household and a resident creature, which is a different and unverified use of a real technical term.
Hoaxing Field jargon: Deliberate fabrication of tracks, sounds, film or testimony. Believers and skeptics agree that some reported sightings are hoaxes; the disagreement is about the fraction. Documented cases include Rant Mullens, who revealed in 1982 that he and other foresters had carved pairs of large wooden feet in the 1930s in Toledo, Washington and used them to make footprints in mud, and the carved wooden feet produced by Ray Wallace's family in 2002.
Holotype Taxonomy: The single physical example, or illustration, used when a species is formally described, and the name-bearing reference from then on. Photographs and DNA alone almost never suffice, and the point is conceded by believers: the North American Wood Ape Conservancy states in its own FAQ that 'there are very few examples of an animal being listed through photographs or even DNA evidence alone. A specimen is required.'
Ichnotaxon Taxonomy: A formal name given to a trace fossil such as a footprint, rather than to the body of the animal that made it. Jeff Meldrum published 'Ichnotaxonomy of giant hominid tracks in North America' in Bulletin 42 of the New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science (Cenozoic Vertebrate Tracks and Traces), 2007, pages 225-232. Naming a track type is a legitimate act in ichnology and is routinely misreported as 'Bigfoot has been given a scientific name.' An ichnotaxon does not describe or establish an animal.
Midtarsal break Primatology: Flexion at the transverse tarsal joint in the middle of the foot. Non-human apes have it, and it lets them lift the heel independently of the forefoot; the human foot is stiff through the midfoot and lacks it, which is one of the traits used to identify humanlike feet in the fossil record, as in Australopithecus africanus. The anatomy is standard primatology; the claim that particular sasquatch casts record such a foot is made in the relict-hominoid literature and is not established.
Minimum viable population Zoology: The smallest size at which a population can persist without facing extinction from natural disasters or demographic, environmental or genetic chance. The old 50/500 rule of thumb, 50 individuals to avoid inbreeding depression and 500 to guard against genetic drift, has been criticized as not applicable across a wide diversity of taxa. Traill, Bradshaw and Brook's 2007 meta-analysis in Biological Conservation 139:159-166, covering 141 sources and 212 species, found a cross-species median MVP of 4,169 individuals (95 percent CI 3,577 to 5,129), and concluded that MVP is context-specific with no short-cuts. This is the arithmetic any Bigfoot population claim has to satisfy while leaving no carcass, no roadkill and no bones.
Misidentification Zoology: Attributing a known animal to an unknown one. Mistaken identification of American black bears is the leading conventional explanation for sighting reports, and there is now a quantitative test: Floe Foxon, 'Bigfoot: If it's there, could it be a bear?', Journal of Zoology 323(1):1-8, published online January 13, 2024, modeled sasquatch reports across the United States and Canada and found a statistically significant association with black bear populations after controlling for human population and forest area.
Momo Media: Short for 'Missouri Monster,' from the state's postal abbreviation and the first two letters of 'monster.' It names a creature reported near Louisiana, Missouri, beginning July 11, 1972, when two boys said they saw it in their backyard; accounts describe an animal about 7 feet tall, bipedal, covered in dark hair, emitting a putrid odor, and in one account having a pumpkin-shaped head. The name was made by the press, not by witnesses.
NAWAC Field jargon: The North American Wood Ape Conservancy, a group that argues an unrecognized ape exists and that a physical specimen is required to establish it. Its FAQ states that investigators 'found blood traces from what they believe was a wounded wood ape' during its 2011 field study Operation Endurance, and that attempts to extract DNA failed because of environmental degradation. Its collection-first position puts it at odds with much of the hobbyist community.
Nocturnal Zoology: Active at night and sleeping by day, as against diurnal, crepuscular (twilight) and cathemeral (both). Nocturnal mammals typically show adaptations such as large eyes relative to body size and a larger cornea and pupil. Reported sasquatch activity is overwhelmingly nocturnal, and the Skamania County ordinance calls the animal a 'nocturnal primate mammal,' which is a trait written into the description rather than an observation of a known animal.
Onion Mountain cast Field jargon: An alleged Bigfoot footprint cast, long held up as the strongest dermal-ridge specimen. It is the specific cast Matt Crowley worked from in 2005 when he reproduced its ridge detail experimentally.
Orang Pendek Folklore: Indonesian for 'short person,' a reported ground-dwelling bipedal ape of Sumatra, most often placed in Kerinci Seblat National Park. Witness accounts describe an animal covered in short fur and standing 80 to 150 centimeters, about 31 to 59 inches, tall; the best-known older account is a 1923 report by a surveyor named van Heerwarden, who described long arms and short legs. No specimen and no type material exist.
Pareidolia Psychology: The tendency of perception to impose a meaningful interpretation on a nebulous stimulus, so that one detects an object, pattern or meaning where there is none. Karl Ludwig Kahlbaum introduced 'Pareidolie' in an 1866 paper, and the English form appeared in the Journal of Mental Science, volume 13, in 1867. It is not merely wishful thinking after the fact: a 2009 magnetoencephalography study by Hadjikhani and colleagues found face-like objects activating the fusiform face area at about 165 milliseconds, close to the roughly 130 milliseconds for real faces, which places the misreading early in perception rather than in later reinterpretation.
Patty Field jargon: The informal nickname for the figure walking in the Patterson-Gimlin film, which is conventionally described as female on the basis of apparent breasts in the footage. The nickname is community usage and carries no evidentiary weight; naming a filmed shape does not identify it.
PGF (Patterson-Gimlin film) Media: The 16mm color film shot by Roger Patterson and Bob Gimlin on October 20, 1967 alongside a tributary of the Klamath River about 25 logging-road miles northwest of Orleans, California, using a Cine-Kodak K-100 with continuously variable frame speed. It is 23.85 feet long and runs 954 frames: 59.5 seconds at 16 frames per second, or 53 seconds at the 18 frames per second Grover Krantz argued for. The frame rate is genuinely unresolved, and every walking-speed, stature and gait argument built on the film depends on which number is right.
Population viability analysis Statistics: The modeling process that determines the probability a population will go extinct within a given number of years, combining species characteristics with environmental variability. Mark Shaffer's 1978 work introduced random variability into such models and calculated both extinction probabilities and a minimum viable population size. It is the tool that turns 'a breeding population must exist' from a slogan into a testable number.
Relict hominoid Primatology: The preferred term among researchers who argue that an unrecognized ape or hominin survives in remote habitat, chosen to avoid the connotations of 'Bigfoot.' The Relict Hominoid Inquiry, a free online journal hosted at Idaho State University and edited by Jeff Meldrum, a full professor of anatomy and anthropology there, describes itself as 'a refereed venue for the dissemination of scholarly peer-reviewed papers' on the question; its editorial board includes the field biologist George Schaller. A technical-sounding label does not by itself change the evidentiary standing of the claims made under it.
Sasquatch Linguistics: An anglicization of sasq'ets, a word in the Halq'emeylem (Halkomelem) language of the Sts'ailes people of British Columbia's lower Fraser Valley, usually glossed as 'hairy man.' It entered English through J. W. Burns, a teacher and Indian agent who worked with the Sts'ailes and published a collection of local accounts, 'Introducing B.C.'s Hairy Giants,' in Maclean's magazine in 1929. The English word is therefore about a century old and was coined by an outsider; it is not interchangeable with the pop-culture 'Bigfoot.'
Skamania County ordinance Legal: Ordinance 69-01, passed by the Skamania County, Washington board of commissioners at its meeting of April 1, 1969 and published twice in the Skamania County Pioneer as required by law. It forbids the slaying of any 'nocturnal primate mammal variously described as an ape-like creature or a sub-species of Homo sapiens ... generally and commonly known as a Sasquatch, Yeti, Bigfoot, or Giant Hairy ape,' subject to a maximum penalty of a $10,000 fine and five years imprisonment. Despite the April Fool's Day timing it was a real ordinance; it was amended in 1984 and has not been repealed. Popular retellings differ about the penalties, and the details of the 1984 amendment are not established in the sources checked here.
Skunk Ape Folklore: The Florida regional name, from the reported smell, for a hairy hominid described as roughly 5 to 7 feet tall and covered in mottled reddish-brown hair. Reports clustered in Broward County and nearby areas between 1971 and 1975; in 1997 Ochopee fire chief Vince Doerr photographed a dark upright figure after seeing something cross the road, and in 2000 two anonymous photographs reached the Sarasota County Sheriff's Office from a woman who said the animal had been taking apples from her back porch. The National Park Service considers the skunk ape a hoax, and the investigator Joe Nickell attributes reports to Florida black bears, some with mange.
Squatching Media: Going out to look for a sasquatch. Along with 'squatch' and the adjective 'squatchy' for a promising area, the vocabulary was spread by Finding Bigfoot on Animal Planet, which ran from May 29, 2011 to May 27, 2018 and featured BFRO founder and president Matt Moneymaker, evidence analyst Cliff Barackman, field caller James 'Bobo' Fay, and field biologist Ranae Holland as the show's skeptic.
Step angle Field jargon: In tracking and Bigfoot fieldwork, the angle at which each foot is set relative to the line of travel, used to argue that a trackway is or is not a human walking. Clinical gait analysis measures the same idea under the standard parameters 'foot angle' and 'progression line'; 'step angle' is the hobbyist and hunting-tracker phrasing and does not appear in the clinical parameter set.
Stride length Primatology: In gait analysis, the distance between two successive placements of the same foot; step length is the shorter interval between opposite feet. Both are standard measured parameters, and both are used in track claims to argue for a very tall, heavy walker. Grover Krantz's often-quoted figures of about 8 feet and 800 pounds came from biomechanical modeling of the Bossburg Cripplefoot casts. They are calculated inferences from casts, not measurements of an animal.
Substrate Forensics: The ground material a track is impressed into: sand, silt, mud, dust or snow, each of which distorts a print differently. It is not background detail in this subject. The Bossburg tracks were left in snow, and the fine surface detail on casts that has been offered as evidence has been reproduced experimentally during casting.
Sykes 2014 hair study Genetics: Bryan Sykes, Rhettman Mullis, Christophe Hagenmuller, Terry Melton and Michel Sartori, 'Genetic analysis of hair samples attributed to yeti, bigfoot and other anomalous primates,' Proceedings of the Royal Society B 281(1789):20140161, 2014. Of 30 samples, 28 matched known mammals; two Himalayan samples, one from Ladakh and one from Bhutan, were reported as closest to a Paleolithic polar bear. The result did not hold: Edwards and Barnett published 'Himalayan yeti DNA: polar bear or DNA degradation?' in the same journal in 2015, and Gutierrez and Pine concluded in ZooKeys the same year that the sequenced fragment was too short to support the claim and that 'there is no reason to believe that the two samples came from anything other than Brown Bears.'
Taxonomic description Taxonomy: The formal published act that establishes a new species name under the International Code of Zoological Nomenclature. In January 1985 Grover Krantz tried to name Bigfoot in a paper at an International Society of Cryptozoology meeting in Sussex, England, assigning it the binomen Gigantopithecus blacki. This was not permitted, because G. blacki was already an existing taxon and because the creature had no holotype. He later suggested G. canadensis, or Gigantanthropus if it belonged within Homininae.
The Legend of Boggy Creek Media: Charles B. Pierce's 1972 docudrama about the Fouke Monster, made for roughly $160,000 and reported to have taken about $20 million, the 11th highest-grossing film of 1972. It matters here as a transmission mechanism: it shaped what a generation expected an encounter to look like, which is the raw material of expectant attention.
Thermal imaging Field jargon: Cameras that form an image from emitted infrared rather than visible light, marketed to field groups as a way to detect a large animal at night. The physics works, but the limits are severe for this use: uncooled units commonly run around 160x120 or 320x240 pixels, far below optical cameras, and the reduced pixel count makes it harder to distinguish targets within the same field of view. Everyday materials, including eyeglass lenses, are opaque at these wavelengths. A warm blob at distance carries almost no species information.
Tree structure Field jargon: A hobbyist term for leaning, broken or interwoven trees and branches interpreted as deliberately built by a sasquatch. No scientific literature documents such construction, and the North American Wood Ape Conservancy, which argues an unrecognized ape exists, lists among the problems for its own case the 'absolute absence of credible reported observations of rudimentary cultural traits beyond what might ordinarily be expected from a great ape, such as the construction of crude nests or shelters.'
Type specimen Taxonomy: The umbrella term for a specimen fixed as the reference for a scientific name. Where an original is lost or lacks the features needed to tell the species from its relatives, a neotype may be designated under Article 75 of the International Code of Zoological Nomenclature; Article 75.3.7 requires a statement that the neotype is the property of a recognized scientific or educational institution that maintains a research collection and makes it accessible for study. No type specimen of any kind exists for the sasquatch.
Wallace feet History: The collection of large carved wooden feet that the family of Ray Wallace, a coworker of Jerry Crew, revealed from his basement after his death in 2002, saying that Wallace had secretly made the footprints and was responsible for the tracks Crew found in 1958. That the carvings exist and that the family said this is documented. That these particular carvings made those particular 1958 prints rests on the family's statement, not on a published physical match.
Whoop Field jargon: A loud, drawn-out call that field groups produce or broadcast in the hope of provoking a reply. The best-known alleged responses are the Sierra Sounds, recorded by Ron Morehead and Al Berry in the Sierra Nevada beginning in 1971, with the 1972 material taped from inside their camp; the recordings contain howls, grunts, knocking sounds and the vocalizations nicknamed 'samurai chatter,' and Morehead and Berry have not disclosed the exact location. Scott Nelson, a retired naval cryptologic linguist, concluded the sounds were a non-human language and not faked; Berry, who died in 2012, said someone could theoretically have faked them. Mainstream scholarly sources have not studied the recordings.
Wildman (woodwose) Folklore: A hairy forest human that recurs across medieval European art, literature and heraldry. The English name is a compound of Old English wude, 'woodland, forest,' and wasa, of uncertain etymology, perhaps 'forest dweller.' By the twelfth century the wild folk were almost invariably described as hairy all over; the German epic Sigenot was known in the thirteenth century; by the second half of the fifteenth century it was conventional to have engravings made of a wild man holding a family's coat of arms, and two wild men support heraldic shields in the side panels of Albrecht Durer's Portrait of Oswald Krell of 1499. The visual template long predates any North American sighting report.
Wood knocking Field jargon: Striking a tree with a bat or branch to elicit an answering knock, treated by hobbyists as sasquatch communication. The practice reached a mass audience through Animal Planet's Finding Bigfoot, which ran from May 29, 2011 to May 27, 2018 and had its team use wood knocks and howls to mimic what it described as Bigfoot communication. It comes from television and hobbyist fieldwork, not from any published study of animal behavior.
Yeren Folklore: The Chinese 'wild man,' reported most famously from the Shennongjia Forestry District in Hubei Province, an area of 3,253 square kilometers (1,256 square miles) of mountain forest. Zhou Guoxing led a Chinese Academy of Sciences expedition there in 1977; later work collected alleged footprints, hair samples and sightings, and no specimen has been produced. Witness accounts describe an upright animal standing over 6 feet tall, covered in tawny or black-red hair, with long arms reaching to the knees and a face said to resemble both an ape and a human.
Yeti Folklore: A hairy hominid of Himalayan tradition. The English 'Abominable Snowman' rests on a mistranslation: after Lieutenant-Colonel Charles Howard-Bury's 1921 Everest reconnaissance reported large tracks, his Sherpa companions volunteered the name recorded as 'metoh-kangmi,' and the journalist Henry Newman translated 'metoh' as 'filthy' and then substituted 'abominable.' The elements are glossed as 'man-bear' and 'snowman'; the word yeti itself is traced to Tibetan g.ya' dred, roughly 'rocky-place bear.'
Yowie Folklore: The Australian hairy hominid. The word's origin is unsettled: William Ridley's 1875 Kamilaroi and Other Australian Languages recorded 'Yo-wi' among the Gamilaraay as a spirit that roams the earth at night, while the nineteenth-century colonial press more often used 'Yahoo,' as in a November 1876 Australian Town and Country Journal item about 'the Yahoo-Devil Devil, or hairy man of the wood.' The historian Graham Joyner has argued that the Yowie was relatively unknown before the mid-1970s and that the modern figure grew out of misreadings of those earlier accounts.