October 5, 1958

At a road construction site in Bluff Creek, California, Gerald Crew finds big tracks in August and then again on October 1 and 2, 1958. He is told by his fellow workers, some of whom are Hoopa Indians, the maker is a hairy forest giant. Crew, using plaster of Paris, thanks to instructions from taxidermist Bob Titmus, makes a replica of the large print at the site on October 3, 1958.

Jerry Crew brings his cast to the local newspaper and shows it to the editor, Andrew Genzoli who publishes his illustrated story in the Humboldt Times on October 5, 1958. Genzoli repeats the name that he hears from the all-male construction crew and their wives (especially Jess Bemis and her letter to Genzoli), that the creature that made the track is called “Bigfoot.”

The publication of that photograph of Crew holding an enormous foot-shaped plaster cast becomes a turning point in the pursuit of hairy wild hominoids in North America, and soon the world. Everybody wants to see whatever was making such imprints, and the public becomes interested in learning more about “Bigfoot.”

The surviving copy of that Jerry Crew 1958 cast from Bluff Creek, California, clearly shows it does not match the fakes revealed by the Ray Wallace family, after Ray Wallace died in 2002.

While those wooden Wallace hoaxes may have been used to create other contemporary dubious prints, they do not mirror the Jerry Crew “Bigfoot” cast from October 1958.

Sources: The Field Guide to Bigfoot and Other Mystery Primates (NY: Anomalist Books, 2006) and Bigfoot! The True Story of Apes in America (NY: Simon and Schuster, 2003)