The Bluff Creek footprints

On 27 August 1958 a bulldozer operator named Jerry Crew found oversized footprints beside his machine on a logging road in California's Six Rivers National Forest. In 2002 Wallace's family said Wallace had made them.

On 27 August 1958, a logging company's catskinner named Jerry Crew noticed abnormally large prints beside his bulldozer, pressed into the soil. His crew of about thirty men was building Bluff Creek Road through Douglas fir stands, inside the Six Rivers National Forest. Mental Floss reports that he first took bears or a mountain lion for the likely cause, then looked again. The prints were close to 16 inches long and about seven inches wide, pressed deep into the graded road. Wikipedia gives their length as 16 inches. The History Collection gives 18 inches and a stride of 50 inches.

Crew's coworkers began recalling similar tracks at earlier job sites. They also told of a 450 pound oil drum moved with no explanation. The History Collection adds that Andrew Genzoli's report on the footprints gave the creature the name "Big Foot".

When Wallace died at 84 in 2002, his family announced that he had made the tracks. The Seattle Times of that year carried the family's account that he orchestrated the prank that created Bigfoot. That is the family's claim, made more than four decades after the event.