AI image: The many faces of Bigfoot encounters. Unfortunately, AI made them look identical. Maybe if we look hard enough we’ll see subtle differences… maybe that’s what AI is trying to teach us? Clever.
We like to organize our world. This may not be true for all people, but generally we humans love to categorize stuff. Categories make our lives easier. Imagine going to the grocery store and finding the items randomly placed on shelves. The Land O’Lakes butter is between the Ragu pasta sauce and the Cheerios cereal, which are across the aisle from the Gordon’s frozen fish and the Entenmann’s donuts. No more cereal aisles or produce sections. Imagine the chaos! We truly categorize everything, not just groceries: People, places, things, activities, ideas, you name it. We even categorize ourselves.
Remember your high school class? I remember social cliques such as jocks and rats and potheads and nerds and gear heads and hair bands and the others. While I had over 300 unique kids in my graduating class, we had a much small number of social groups. Social network researchers call this homophily, or our tendency to associate with people similar to us. If you like hunting or cars or clothes or art or weight training or whatever, you probably have friends who also like those things. Substack knows this, and the designers have conveniently divided all the posts and newsletters and notes into content areas — culture, politics, finance, science, technology, sports, business, arts, and so on. This makes the whole thing easier to navigate and for us to find what’s interesting and important.
If you’ve been reading my posts, this probably sounds similar to the idea of social worlds that anchored my first couple of posts on TSB.
Why am I carrying on about this? Because Bigfoot encounter reports are no different. These reports are just another thing that we can organize, though it’s a bit more challenging than separating our canned goods from our fresh veggies, or distinguishing the decent folks from the d-bags. Let’s take a look a well-known set of categories in the social world of Bigfoot and then I’ll share my own set of categories.
The Bigfoot Field Research Organization’s Classification System
The BFRO maintains perhaps the most well-known database of Bigfoot witness reports in North America. There may be others, such as John Green’s collection of reports compiled long before the Internet was a thing. The BFRO database is a bit messy. Yes, its structured in that witnesses fill out a common form1, but all reports are voluntary and vary widely in detail and timeliness. I could submit a report this afternoon that describes an encounter I had 30 years ago (I did not have one, by the way). This is OK but it creates a lot of work on the back-end to sort through and clean up the data. In fact, the BFRO states that, “None of the modern reports in the BFRO's online database are made public without some kind of investigation.”
That investigation concludes with a judgment about how to classify the report. The BFRO uses 3 classes: Class A, Class B, and Class C. These are described online as the Report Classification System2 and I’ll summarize the classes here. If you’re curious about BFRO investigation results, they publish witness reports and investigator notes on their website3.
Class A: This class includes reports for which plausible alternative explanations are unlikely and only the Bigfoot explanation remains to best explain the evidence. In other words, the likelihood of misinterpretation by the witness is low. The BFRO only includes visual sightings in Class A: non-visual encounters by default go into Class B.
Class B: Unlike Class A reports, these have potential to involve observer error (or more generally, sensory deception) due to lighting, distance, duration or other contextual factors. The BFRO says that Class B reports could be just as credible and important as Class A reports; the only difference is that the absence of a clear visual confirmation leaves Class B encounters more vulnerable to misinterpretation by the witness.
Class C. This seems like a catch-all for any secondhand reports submitted to the BFRO. Even when the original source is identifiable, without a firsthand report from the witness the BFRO recognizes potential for misinterpretation. The misinterpretation could relate to the original witness or to the story-teller as they heard it from the witness. As you’ll soon see, Class C reports are infrequent and really just muddy our waters. So let’s ignore Class C for now.
The BFRO website does not share the frequency of reports within each class, so I downloaded available BFRO report data from Kaggle4 and filtered for any reports after 2009. This is a somewhat arbitrary date, but I wanted more recent cases and this gave me 1,016 reports within the past 15 years. While I write “somewhat arbitrary,” I should point out the implications of setting this cut-off date. The chart below shows the trend in Class A and Class B reports since 1970. Until about 2005, reports that were judged by BFRO investigators to be Class A typically out-paced those judged to be Class B. This pattern changed abruptly after 2005. This could reflect changes in witness characteristics, changes in investigators, changes in the protocols used to make classification judgments, some other factors, or any combination of factors.
Among the 1,016 reported encounters in the past 15 years, just over one-third (376 or 37%) are coded as Class A and all the rest (640 or 63%) are coded as Class B. This doesn’t tell us much about the whole population of possible encounters, since BFRO sighting reports are voluntary. Among all reported and unreported encounters, there could be more Class A, more Class B, or a similar proportion to what we find in the BFRO database. And like the graph above, these proportions could change over time.
How do these classes fit with our possible theories on Bigfoot as either a natural species or as a product of deception? If we take the BFRO classifications as reliable and valid data on encounters, we could say that Class A reports offer evidence that Bigfoot are a natural species. On the other hand, Class B reports offer evidence that Bigfoot are the product of deception. If you remember my last post, our theory of deception includes sensory deception (observer error and pareidolia), cognitive deception (lying and hoaxing), andself-deception (apophenia, unreliable memory, and a disordered mind).
Overall, I felt the BFRO classifications were too broad and didn’t offer much by way of understanding the variety of encounter reports. I appreciate the dichotomy of good vs questionable evidence, but can we organize the 1,016 recent reports into more fine-grained categories? This could give us a better understanding of these encounter reports and how we might further analyze them. For example, do these reports describe mundane encounters, as David Daegling believed, or do a significant number of these reports describe aggressive or threatening encounters?
My Working Typology for Encounter Reports
AI image: “OK, OK. I’ll do aggressive this time and you do passive. Check me out! What do you think? Too much with the teeth?”
After listening to dozens or maybe hundreds of firsthand stories of Bigfoot encounters, I began to recognize themes in the narratives. For now, I’m setting aside the question of Bigfoot as a natural species or as a deception and I’m focused on organizing the content of these Bigfoot reports.
I should note that I did not randomly select encounter stories, but rather focused on those I found persuasive and intriguing… and honestly, realistic. There is bias in my choices. But hey, this isn’t a peer review publication and I can do whatever the fuck I want! Frankly, there is no shortage of confusing and suspect encounter stories popping up in the patchwork of Bigfoot-related social media channels.
My current and still-developing typology includes several categories. There are five “levels”, which suggests an increasing magnitude of something. I initially thought this something was about encounter intensity. This didn’t quite fit; a witness in a Level-1 encounter could experience an equally intense emotional response as a witness in a Level-4 encounter. It’s more accurate to say the levels reflect the extent of interaction between the witness and the supposed Bigfoot. Think about how you might interact with that cute stranger sitting across the bar: you might have just missed them or you might end up in deep conversation5.
In relation to the BFRO classes, most of these levels could be classified as either Class A or Class B. The exception is Level-1, due to a lack of visual confirmation, so this falls into Class B by default. Even so, these levels are not meant to replace BFRO classes but rather to complement, if not augment, them.
Level-0: These are asynchronous encounters. That is, there’s evidence that a Bigfoot might have been in the witness’s current location, as shown by foot tracks, scat, stray hairs, tree breaks, etc. Bigfoot was possibly around at some point but is no longer present. There is no real-time interaction here; just circumstantial evidence discovered by the witness.
Level-1: This and the remaining levels are synchronous encounters. In Level-1 there is evidence of Bigfoot currently in the witness’s proximity, as demonstrated by loud calls, tree knocks, stone throws, strong odors, bi-pedal footsteps, etc. Bigfoot is believed to be nearby but there is no visual confirmation. Les Stroud’s encounter6 in Alaska is a Level 1. Les described gorilla-like sounds coming from just beyond his camp and says, “Anyway, I finish my scene and I turn the cameras off and I’m just sort of standing there and I hear this sound and I’m like, “What the hell?”, you know.”
Level-2: This adds visual confirmation but the sighting is one-directional. There is no indication from the witness that the Bigfoot was aware of the witness’s presence. Level-2 is common among hunters and hikers who see Bigfoot from a distance without being noticed by the creature. Jay’s encounter7 in North Tennessee is an example, where he observed the creature for 45 minutes without being noticed. He says, “At first, he stood up he had his back to me, and must have been laying down when I first saw it. I was just seeing his knees and his legs. So I thought it was a bear. It stood up, maybe 5-10 minutes after it got light, and I had watched the thing grab a rock and he was going from tree to tree, smacking on the trees.”
Level-3: This introduces mutual recognition between the witness and the Bigfoot. Anthropologist and Bigfoot debunker David Daegling would call these encounters “mundane” interactions. The Bigfoot simply acknowledges the witness and then casually turns away and disappears into the forest. Warren’s encounter8 in Hope, BC is an example of this. Warren stood just feet from a Bigfoot and described the experience like this: “I've never known such terror in my life, to see something like that. So I looked at it. It looked at me. It, it made this big grunting sound like **mimics the sound** like that and a big cloud of frozen breath came out of its nostrils and its mouth.” Warren says that after a few seconds the creature walked away and into the bush.
AI Image: “Hmm. Well, OK. Didn’t expect any humans out this early. Imma gonna step back into the woods. Just pretend you didn’t see me.”
Level-4: These are aggressive interactions with Bigfoot, as demonstrated by Bigfoot bearing teeth, chest pounding, yelling or roaring, charging, or similar behaviors targeted at the witness. Level-4 is often characterized by competition between the witness and Bigfoot, whether for home territory, hunting grounds, or specific prey animals. Mark had a Level-4 encounter9 in East Texas. Mark encountered two creatures while alone on a deer lease. He first thought he was looking at two large men but then realized these were something else. He says:
And they get right there on the edge of the road, where the creek is, and one of them turns and looks at me. I know this guy can see me and I'm trying to see if I can identify him, or if I know him.[…] This thing, it cocked its head back and let out a scream. I mean... it... I don't know how to describe it. Man, you could have heard it in another county. And when he did that, the other one took off to the right and just disappeared in the grass. And it was like it was coming towards my area. I cranked up and took off.
Level-4 could include physical contact, and my early attempts at this typology included a Level-5 for these “attack” encounters. However, these are too infrequent to justify a separate level just yet, and these narratives often include speculation about a government conspiracy to hide the existence of Bigfoot… which adds a layer of complexity to the encounter and possibly makes deception a more plausible explanation. Not that I immediately dismiss these reports. I’m just saying there are nuances to these levels that may need to be addressed separately. So for now these encounters sit in Level-4.
AI image: “That’s it. I’ve had it with these damn hunters. No more of that mundane encounter shit. Get over here you little bastard!”
The Bottom-line
Humans do not tolerate complexity. We organize things, if only to make living less troublesome. Sometimes there’s value in how we organize, but not always, or old ways of organizing no longer satisfy us. Maybe this is why Costco keeps relocating my favorite products. I don’t know, but in the social world of Bigfoot I appreciate the BFRO classification system. Maybe my working typology can add some value, give us a better understanding of what’s happening in the woods, and help us separate what’s real and what’s deception.
Next time TSB
So much to write about! I’m still exploring the concept of ‘myth’ and whether this even make sense in the realm of Bigfoot. I also want to share thoughts on foot tracks as a source of evidence. And I have an itch to scratch on the topic brain parasites. But first I want to continue down this path of analyzing witness reports. Next time, I’ll get into narrative analysis and I’ll share what I see as common themes across Bigfoot encounter stories. I don’t know where exactly this is leading, but stick with TSB and we’ll discover it — and maybe Bigfoot — together.
You can find the BFRO datasets on Kaggle here: https://www.kaggle.com/datasets/mexwell/bigfoot-sightings/data NOTE: I focused on the “bfro_reports_geocoded.csv”, downloaded on May 12, 2025.
You can find Warren’s encounter on Sasquatch Chronicles here: https://sasquatchchronicles.com/sc-ep158-face-to-face-with-a-sasquatch-in-british-columbia/
