The media origin of Bigfoot in the USA dates back to 1958, in northern California, when a man named Jerry Crew brought to a local newspaper a plaster cast of a huge footprint which he said was left by a giant apelike creature seen near his road construction site. Actually the carving of a wood plank into a crude foot, and using it to make giant footprints around a camp, was a standard practical joke going back well into the 19th Century. Crew's sighting, widely reported in local newspapers, inspired Roger Patterson, who lived in the area, to make a 16 mm home movie of a Bigfoot walking away from his camera. While he could have made the movie after the Crew publicity, if so, he backdated it, claiming to have shot it in 1957. That movie, crude as it is, put Bigfoot firmly onto the map of pseudoscience and in the 65 years since, Bigfeet have been reported in just about every state in the good old USA.

Patterson with footprint casts

This particular area of Northern California actually has had a long history of "hairy forest monster" sightings, accumulating long before Patterson and Crew got into the act.  Of course, no actual hairy forest monsters  exist in any of the regions where Bigfoot has been sighted.  Indeed, the very last place on earth one would find an apelike monster is in North America.  The apes (apart from humans) never made it from Asia to the Americas, although monkeys did.  If apes had made it, at roughly the same time humans did, there should today be many different variations, like black bears and brown bears and grizzy bears, whose members would be wandering around in plain sight, like any real animal!  Don't Bigfeet ever die of natural causes, or get hit by cars or trucks?  Couldn't they be trapped?  What do they eat?  Where do they sleep?  Real animals have to live with us in our world... imaginary animals don't.

It is also important to realize that the tradition of the woods being inhabited by hairy "wild men" is an ancient tradition in Europe.  Nearly every nation in Europe was awash at one time or another in the distant past with tales of "the wild men of the woods," which in every significant respect were identical to the American tales of the Bigfoot or Sasquatch. As the Wikipedia entry points out, hairy wild men are a literary archetype. In the oldest surviving adventure fiction in human history, the Epic of Gilgamish, the hero's sidekick is a hairy wild man of the woods, Enkidu. George Lucas was well aware of this in giving Han Solo a gigantic, hairy faithful sidekick, Chewbacca.