(Roughly) Daily

 click here (and again) for larger version

Every now and then a dataset comes along that just has to be mapped. This is one of those times.

Bigfoot. Sasquatch. Skookum. Yahoo. Whatever you call it, the towering man-like ape is a folklore staple. From stories of Yeti in the Himalayas to Wildmen in the Pacific Northwest, people have been talking about and trying to find the creature for ages. Occasionally, some form of evidence – like Patterson’s famous 1967 film – emerges and either feeds our fascination or gets dismissed as a hoax. In either case, it’s easy to see why believers search for proof and skeptics remain doubtful.

Through archival work and reports submitted directly to their website, the Bigfoot Field Researchers Organization has amassed a database of thousands of sasquatch sightings. Each report is geocoded and timestamped. Occasionally, even photos and videos of the alleged evidence are included. I’m not quite sure how I stumbled across this, but I’m glad I did.

After crawling the data and converting it to a more convenient format, I mapped and graphed all 3,313 sightings that were reported from 1921 to 2013…

Read Josh Steven‘s fascinating notes on “92 Years of Bigfoot Sightings in the U.S. and Canada”  (and do browse the comments…)

###

As we we ask Nessie if she’s seen him, we might recall that it was on this date in 1836 that HMS Beagle called at the Island of St. Michael’s (north of the Azores) for letters, then sailed for England.  The ship’s naturalist, Charles Darwin, did not sight Bigfoot.

 source