Finding Bigfoot (Online): A Guide to Squatchers on the Internet
Imagine this happens to you: you’re alone, lost in the deep dark woods, and the sound of something, or someone, is following your every step. It seems larger than another human, too controlled to be a bear. You catch glimpses through the trees of a huge, hairy ape, whose howl haunts you as you slam the cabin door shut and hide under the covers.
In the morning though, no one one believes you. Not when you tell the story back in town, in the light of day. What proof did you bring back? No photos, no fur, no plaster casts of footprints. Nothing. So you do what anyone does now. You go online, desperate and eager for someone, anyone, to listen, to hear you out, and most importantly, believe you.
But where do you go? Where do you find a community willing to accept you, where you can make sense of your experience, where you can belong? Where can you prove that the impossible did happen to you?
The Digital Landscape of Bigfoot Believers
Bigfoot groups have existed on the Internet for quite a long time. The Bigfoot Field Researchers Organization has had their own website since the late 1990s. Scouring its databases of sightings and evidence, one can see that any type of Sasquatch encounter will make its way there, and self-titled “experts” will evaluate them with scientific-sounding rigor. Yet what you want is not to pour over numbers, but to share your encounter in detail.
For this, any number of social media platforms will offer groups, networks, and forums where you can share your story, where you can listen to other stories, and share your newfound belief in Sasquatch. The Bigfoot community is spread out and decentralized. No one community or website carries more power than any other, but some might be more useful for sharing your story than others. These websites are where the skeptics are weeded out from the true believers.
Among some of the more active websites are r/Bigfoot on Reddit, the Bigfoot Community group page on Facebook, and an independent website called BigfootForums.com. Interestingly, platforms like Instagram and Twitter, while having many individual accounts dedicated to Bigfoot art, legends, or in-person organizations, don’t seem to have much in the way of actual peer-to-peer community spaces. Which makes sense. Instagram and Twitter are structured to encourage top-down engagement with established accounts. But if you, a newcomer to this community, want to be heard, digital spaces like forums and message boards function like a campfire, a place for any and all to tell their story.
BigfootForums: A Closer Look
The most helpful for you, if you’re not trying to find Bigfoot merchandise to buy, or write a pseudoscientific research paper, would be BigfootForums.com. The community here, while smaller than on Facebook or Reddit, is welcoming of all types of Bigfoot talk, from serious lore analysis and carefully captured outdoor camera footage to the many trolls trying to goad or provoke the earnest Squatchers. Name your interest in Bigfoot, and there’s a message thread on the forum for it: historical newspaper accounts, details about upcoming conferences and symposiums, as well as just general Bigfoot discussion. It’s not tied to any specific geographical location; you can find an irl Bigfoot expedition to join next weekend from the forests of the Pacific Northwest to the Blue Ridge mountains of North Carolina and Tennessee.
Some Squatcher Statistics
According to their internal statistics, BigfootForums.com membership amounts to roughly the size of a high school, about 1,100 members, down from its peak in 2016 of just over 2,500. But this relatively small community is highly active; there are almost 28,000 total topics, and 850k posts total on the website. Users engage with each other constantly, swapping stories, articles, photos, and jokes.
Beyond Bigfoot
But know that BigfootForums.com isn’t just a place to talk about Sasquatch and to defend your experiences. Any level of engagement with this community is acceptable. Once you’ve found this group of like-minded people, you might want to share other parts of yourself with them, posting in the memes thread, the sports thread, or the politics thread. You’re not even tied to your real name — you can make an account under any username you can come up with. You can easily tell who is online, whose words carry weight and authority in the community, and who to ignore.
You can write up the story of that night in the woods, and just like that, you’ve found your Bigfoot home, and you’re safe. The community believes, without question. The user base will tell you that the same thing happened to them, that what happened that night was typical Sasquatch behavior. They’re curious, they tell you. They want to know what it’s like to be you, just like you want to know what it’s like to be them.
