Before a baby can walk it must learn to crawl, and before it can run must learn to walk. Everything we do comes in stages; one step must be mastered before the next step can be taken. Many researchers or investigators, myself included, sometimes get a step or two in front of ourselves before we have mastered the initial steps. We try to run before we have even learned how to crawl and this has been the recipe for many failures trying to achieve our common goal of solving the mystery of bigfoot. “Give a man a fish and you’ll feed him for the day.” We should all pay heed to the old Chinese proverb “Teach a man to fish and you’ll feed him for a lifetime.” Successful fisherman never go to the water without a plan or knowledge to tell them where to look for the fish they are after, we should do the same. What can we learn from the habits of experienced, successful fishermen?

The primary focus should be where you look. If you plan on fishing for largemouth bass, where would you go? It’s obvious you wouldn’t go to a parking lot or playground or out in the middle of a desert — you need water. Therefore, you look at the different types of water to determine which have proven to be the most productive for finding bass. You wouldn’t waste your time in a fast moving mountain stream, a swimming pool or the ocean. You would look for a lake or pond that has the kind of structure you know is good bass habitat. You want sunken trees and/or stumps and maybe something that creates shadows on the water such as overhanging trees, lily pads, boat docks or boathouses. You have effectively narrowed down considerably where you would look based on the knowledge you have acquired from others, your own experiences or research. I propose we can develop similar criteria when it comes to looking for bigfoot. The clues and knowledge are there, if we take the time to look for it rather than striking out in a haphazard way driven strictly by instinct or desperation.

So let’s look at the reports for any significant similarities we can find.

Rather than go through all of the reports available, I started out by looking at the top ten states with submitted reports at the BFRO. Those states in order are: Washington, California, Oregon, Ohio, Texas, Florida, Colorado, New York, Pennsylvania and Michigan. In looking at the list, I can easily understand Washington and Oregon, but California tends to confuse me. I agree that much of the northern part of the state looks like it would be good habitat for bigfoot, but the number of reports would suggest bigfoot must heavily populate it as well. However, then I’d expect that with California’s population and visitors there would be even more reports than what are shown. Could it be that the state doesn’t necessarily have a much larger population of bigfoot, but that maybe more than one person sights the same or small group of bigfoot? I think a piece of evidence that may point towards this conclusion can be found by looking at the sightings along a specific stretch of road found in NW California. Highway 101 runs along the Pacific Coastline from California all the way up through Oregon and Washington. Along a specific stretch of this highway from Orick north to Crescent City, there have been a fair number of sightings in a very small area. The fact that this is also the busiest highway for miles in any direction adds to the possibility of multiple sightings of fewer individuals. There is also another important thing to know about this area, but I would like to wait until a little later before addressing that.

Now wondering about the possibility of population playing a role in the numbers, I took another look at the sightings submitted. I took the population of the states and divided population by the number of sightings reported. Outwardly looking at the final figures you can create an odds table to see what your odds are of finding a bigfoot or significant evidence. If, for instance, it broke down to 1 out of every 15,000 people have reported a sighting that would seem to indicate a better opportunity than to look in an area where only 1 out of every 750,000 people have sighted or found evidence of a bigfoot. Looking at the reports from this perspective, California which had been number two, now dropped to nineteenth place with one sighting per 105,341 inhabitants. The top ten states with the number of people for each sighting following the state’s name are as follows:

Washington 15,958
Wyoming 15,959
Oregon 16,672
Idaho 28,754
Alaska 34,929
Montana 40,681
Arkansas 44,113
West Virginia 45,521
Colorado 56,207
Oklahoma 57,224

Wyoming might seem like a surprising addition to this list, with the small number of sightings reported for that state, but in comparison to it’s small population there is a high sighting ratio. The lifestyle of those in Wyoming is different from many other states. There are more jobs in the outdoors with their many ranches and farms than most other states, so it stands to reason that there should be more interactions between humans and bigfoot. This reasoning is supported by the appearance of a state with a similar lifestyle, Montana, being in the list based on the same premise.

Having looked at both the raw number of sightings per state, as well as sightings per capita, I decided to look at sightings per square mile and see how that list was different from the previous two. There is the possibility of a denser population of bigfoot within that state with fewer square miles per sighting. So with that in mind, here’s the top ten list for square miles per sighting with the number following the state’s name in this list the number of square miles per sighting.

Washington 181
Ohio 240
New Jersey 291
California 477
Maryland 496
Oregon 505
Pennsylvania 591
West Virginia 606
Florida 685
New York 690

The State of Washington held first place in all three lists. In accordance, I think we can agree that Washington is probably the most likely state that will produce the best chance of any of us finding evidence, or having a sighting of bigfoot. Unfortunately, it’s also quite different outwardly from most other states as far as geographic makeup. So there’s still the necessity of making a final list to obtain information from which to produce a search profile.