TOURISM TARGET? Under new bill, Bigfoot could become Californias official cryptid California has a lot of official symbols. But none are cryptids. Nate Anderson Feb 21, 2025 5:01 pm | 17 Credit: Getty Images Credit: Getty Images Story textSizeSmallStandardLargeWidth *StandardWideLinksStandardOrange* Subscribers only Learn moreYou might suspect that a one-line bill about Bigfoot that bears the number "666" is a joke, but AB-666 is apparently a serious offering from California Assemblymember Chris Rogers. Rogers represents a California district known for its Bigfoot sightings (or "sightings," depending on your persuasionmany of these have been faked), and he wants to make Bigfoot the "official cryptid" of the state.His bill notes that California already has many official symbols, including the golden poppy (official flower), the California redwood (official tree), the word "Eureka" (official motto), the red-legged frog (official amphibian), the grizzly bear (official animal), swing dancing (official dance), and the saber-toothed cat (official fossil). The state has so many of these that there are separate categories for freshwater fish (golden trout) and marine fish (garibaldi). So why not, Rogers wants to know, "designate Bigfoot as the official state cryptid"?That's... pretty much the bill, which was introduced this week and already has Bigfoot advocates excited. SFGate talked to Matt Moneymaker, who it describes as "a longtime Bigfoot researcher and former star of the Animal Planet series Finding Bigfoot," about the bill. Moneymaker loves it, noting that he has personally had a face-to-face encounter one time, after which I was absolutely sure they existed because I had one about 20 feet in front of me, growling at me.Rogers represents California Assembly District 2, a sprawling expanse of Northern California that includes the town of Willow Grove, epicenter of the early Bigfoot sightings back in the 1950s. Today, the small community boasts the Bigfoot Museum, the Bigfoot Motel, and the Bigfoot Steakhouseto say nothing of Bigfoot's Barbershop, Bigfoot Equipment & Repair, and, of course, the Bigfoot Cannabis Company. The bill seems like an easy way to goose interest in Bigfoot and to reap the tourist dollars that come from that interest.This is not to deny the underlying reality of a Bigfoot-like creature (though you can indeed count me among the extremely, extremely skepticalsurely most of these sightings are of bears). Moneymaker runs the Bigfoot Field Researchers' Organization, which tracks sightings across the US. The most recent one I could find on the site was report 77,879 (!), which came from rural Buchanan County, Virginia, on November 10, 2024.A woman working in the food service of a local prison submitted a report describing how she drove to work at 2 am for an early morning shiftand saw an alleged Bigfoot beside the road."I was turning on a side road at the main gate of the coal mines," she writes. "I drove less than a quarter mile from the coal mines when I saw a large what I thought was a bear or feral cow beside the road so I slowed down in case it spooked and ran across the road. That was when I noticed it was on two legs and was large but was kneeling down if I had to guess I would say it was 500600 pounds. This animal had shaggy fur that I could see the outline of from the lights. It looked over what seemed to be its shoulder and had a human like face with a heavy brow. It looked back through the brush and then looked quickly back again before stepping toward the creek and climbed down and went out of sight. The thing that made me stop in the road was it had a knee and was looking through the brush holding it apart to look through. This "animal" had no eye shine. Once I passed its location I saw that it had been looking at 2 does."Remarkably, this huge creature is reliably spotted alive across the US, from Virginia to a famed spot in Ohio to Willow Grove, California. Despite the ubiquity of cell phones, people keep running into Bigfeet (Bigfoots?) but can't manage to snap a compelling picture or video.And no dead bodies are ever found. And when scientists do put out calls for possible Bigfoot hair, what they get is material from horses, bears, tapirs, cows, raccoons, and mule deerbut nothing from a Bigfoot. And let's not even get started on attempts to sequence the DNA of a Bigfoot.Clearly, if it exists, this is one crafty animal. And it might just become California's next official symbol.Or it might not. A similar idea was proposed in Washington state in 2017. Despite being reintroduced several times, the bill never seems to have made it out of committee.Nate AndersonDeputy EditorNate AndersonDeputy Editor Nate is the deputy editor at Ars Technica. His most recent book is In Emergency, Break Glass: What Nietzsche Can Teach Us About Joyful Living in a Tech-Saturated World, which is much funnier than it sounds. 17 Comments