khatores: T.rex: chitownmike: T.rex: I think ultimately, it speaks to something primal in our psyche.    Even if there were no Patterson-Gimlin video or concept of Bigfoot per se, the concept would still exist anyway...

Its like dragons, or shadow people.... Its a shared consciousness across the globe, spanning thousands of years.

If only there were a word for that...

Where are you going with this?  Religion?   I was thinking the other day, even if one is not religious or even believes in a higher power, the tenets of the major religions can and should still be useful, as they represent the ideas that have been formulated and refined over a few millenias by billions of people.  The backstories don't need to be taken literally... it's all about conducting oneself properly.

Evolutionary psychology, probably. For millions of years, pre-human hominids looked like Bigfoot. Our brains are still cued to look for that hairy man as a high priority pattern, just as we look for faces, spiders and snakes. If you see something move like a snake or a spider out of the corner of your eye, you don't even have to think about it...your body automatically reacts to get you out of the danger zone. That's millions of years of your ancestors dying from spider and snake bites. Similarly we see faces and shadow people everywhere because that's how we stayed alive.