Our Footprint Grows

With urbanization spreading as Western North Carolina grows, it's no wonder why we are reporting more encounters with wildlife every year. The amount of bear reports in North Carolina has drastically increased over the last 20 years, but is it really bears that people are encountering?

With the mountainous and tree covered environment that WNC is cradled into, you would expect these encounters to be consistent with maybe a few spikes in the dataset, but it seems to have a steady increase in numbers since 1998.

Growing up in this region I would hear stories about Bigfoot sightings all the time from relatives and friends (of course without evidence to back up their stories). As time passed I heard far less stories about Bigfoot encounters, and more about bear sightings.

The Process

The diagram above illustrates the process that the Bigfeet went through in order to disguise itself in order to blend into it's surroundings.

My claim is that these "bears" that are coming to dig in your trash can are actually just Bigfeet adapting to the urbanization creeping in around them.

This made it easy for the Bigfeet to be able to get around during the day and fool humans into thinking that it was a just a bear.

Being more comfortable with getting close to humans, Bigfeet started daring to dig in trash cans and venture out from the wilderness to gather food rather than hunt. This lead to people seeing them at night and mistaking the large blobs of dark fur as black bears.