A new assembly bill introduced in California seeks to recognize a legendary humanlike creature as the state’s official “cryptid.”
According to a draft version of the bill introduced on February 14, 2025, Assembly Bill 666 would designate Bigfoot, also known as Sasquatch, as the Golden State’s official state cryptid.
“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,” the proposed bill’s current language reads.
“This bill would state the intent of the Legislature to enact legislation that would designate Bigfoot as the official state cryptid,” it adds.
Introduced by California assembly member Chris Rogers coinciding with the Valentine’s Day holiday, the bill’s number—666—is appropriate, given that this sequence of numbers is famously known as the “number of the beast” in Christianity due to its appearances in many versions of chapter 13 within the Book of Revelation of the New Testament.
Bigfoot: A California Tradition
Bigfoot, the popular name for America’s legendary hirsute humanoid, has its cultural roots in the Golden State. In 1958, a bulldozer operator named Jerry Crew discovered several 16-inch-long humanlike footprints while working on a job site in part of the Six Rivers National Forest in Humboldt County, California.
It is widely believed the footprints Crew discovered, which made national headlines and gave rise to the nickname “Bigfoot” (or “Big Foot” as it also appeared in early news articles), were a hoax perpetrated by one of his coworkers, Ray Wallace, whose family admitted to the prank decades later in 2002 after Wallace passed away.
Although some would trace the concept of “Bigfoot” no further back than the earliest use of this popular name for the legendary creature, predating the 1958 northern California incident is a much earlier complex of traditional beliefs and historical accounts involving large humanlike creatures in the Pacific Northwest.
Indigenous American Traditions
In 1840, Elkanah Walker, an American missionary who traveled to Washington State, wrote in his diary about a “superstition” he said he learned of from the Indigenous Spokane. Walker said the Spokane “believe in a race of giants, which inhabit a certain mountain off to the west of us.” The creatures, which were said to inhabit snowy mountaintops, “hunt and do all their work at night.”
“They are men stealers,” Walker added.
A similar account was written in 1865 by the ethnologist George Gibbs in a previously unpublished portion from the original manuscript that became the book Tribes of Western Washington and Northwestern Oregon, rediscovered by his grandniece, and later provided to the State Historical Society of Wisconsin in 1949.
In the unpublished excerpt, Gibbs discussed traditional beliefs in what he called the Tsiatko among various northwestern Indigenous tribes in Washington and Oregon, also known as Steh-tathl among the Chehalis, and Sheahah among Klickitat tribes. According to Gibbs’ account, “the Tsiatko are described as of gigantic size, their feet eighteen inches long and shaped like a bear’s. They wear no clothes, but the body is covered with hair like that of a dog, only not so thick.”
“Others describe them as of natural size and resembling men, except that they gibber and chatter, one Tsiatko making noise enough to represent a dozen persons,” Gibbs wrote. “They are said to live in the mountains, in holes under ground (sic), and to smell badly. They come down chiefly in the fishing season, at which time the Indians are excessively afraid of them.”
Arrival of the Sasquatch
However, it was the April 1, 1929, edition of the Canadian MacLean’s Magazine that brought one of the most popular names for these legendary mountain giants to the forefront of the cultural lexicon in an article titled “Introducing B.C.’s Hairy Giants.” The article, written by J.W. Burns, a Canadian government agent working as a teacher on the Chehalis Indian Reserve in British Columbia at the time, featured a “collection of strange tales about British Columbia’s wild men as told by those who say they have seen them.”
Some modern scholars have argued that Burns’ article merely recounted folklore involving large “people” (i.e., humans in every aspect of their appearance other than their gigantic size) in the traditional beliefs among the Chehalis. According to this interpretation, the more apelike representations of the supposed creature did not appear until the 1950s, coinciding with the first reports of “Bigfoot” in California.
However, some of the accounts Burns shared in the 1929 article, including one provided by a man named William Point (identified only as “Mr. Point” in Burns’ article but later quoted in other Canadian publications under his full name), seem to contradict this interpretation.
According to Point’s description of one of the creatures, which he and another individual witnessed as it approached them along a railroad track near Agassiz in September 1927, the “creature was naked and covered with hair like an animal … He was twice as big as the average man, with hands so long that they almost touched the ground. It seemed to me that his eyes were very large and the lower part of his nose was wide and spread over the greater part of his face, which gave the creature such a frightful appearance that I ran away as fast as I could.”
Such descriptions represent only a small portion of the broader historical and folkloric information that has given rise to traditional beliefs involving large, hairy, humanlike creatures in the Pacific Northwest. While falling well short of proving their existence, such accounts clearly show that the descriptions of the creatures as essentially apelike and hair-covered—rather than merely being “giant humans”—are evident.
However, another clue to the hairy nature of these folkloric creatures comes from the popular name Burns gave them: Sasquatch. Rather than being an authentic traditional name for the alleged creatures, this term was an invention Burns likely derived from the word Sasq’ets from the Halq’emeylem dialect of the Sts’ailes people. Not surprisingly, it means “hairy man” or “wild man.”
Cryptids and “Cryptozoology”
The term “cryptid” is derived from the word cryptozoology, which generally refers to the study of animals that are not officially recognized by science. The term is often credited to the Belgian-French zoologist Bernard Heuvelmans, who popularized the subject in his 1955 book On the Track of Unknown Animals.
However, according to Heuvelmans’ accounting, the term had been first invented by a colleague of his, the Scottish zoologist Ivan Sanderson, while he “was still a student,” although Heuvelmans later coined the same term “quite unaware that he had already done so.”
According to the eminent cryptozoology scholar Loren Coleman, founder and Director of the International Cryptozoology Museum, the word “cryptid” was first used by John E. Wall of Manitoba, Canada, in a newsletter publication in 1983. “Cryptids are in the most limited definition, either unknown species of animals or those that are thought to be extinct but which may have survived into modern times and await rediscovery by scientists,” Coleman writes in an essay on the meaning of cryptozoology that appears at the Museum’s website.
Many academics characterize cryptozoology as primarily being a subculture rooted in pseudoscience rather than being a serious discipline that adheres to the scientific method. However, proponents of scientific cryptozoology like Coleman draw important distinctions between the idea of popular folkloric creatures that often become associated with specific regions or locales as opposed to scholarly studies involving undiscovered animals or the rediscovery of those once believed extinct—both of which are potentially very much in the wheelhouse of scientists.
“Unfortunately, many of the creatures of most interest to cryptozoologists do not, in themselves, fall under the blanket heading of cryptozoology,” Coleman writes.
Although California Assembly Member Rogers’ presentation of Assembly Bill 666 seems to have been tongue-in-cheek, the proposed bill nonetheless recognizes one of northwestern America’s greatest and most captivating legends, one whose endurance as a cultural phenomenon continues to fascinate Californians and many others throughout North America.
Although Rogers’ bill is still in its early stages, it has reportedly been read aloud in the state Assembly, according to the San Francisco Gate. If the bill ends up clearing committee, it will still be required to pass the Assembly and Senate and, ultimately, make its way to the California Governor’s desk before it is signed into law.
Only then will the creature known as “Sasquatch” or “Bigfoot” finally step out of the shadows of legendary California mysteries to finally assume its position as the state’s official cryptid.
Micah Hanks is the Editor-in-Chief and Co-Founder of The Debrief. He can be reached by email at micah@thedebrief.org. Follow his work at micahhanks.com and on X: @MicahHanks.