Tracking Bigfoot with Data - BFRO Data 1950-2021

Hi everyone... I know it's been a while since I posted. If you could only see my backlog of draft vizzes you'd know how many things I meant to be posting! I've had this one queued up fairly recently and I realized this weekend is Cryptidcon in Lexington KY so what better time to viz one of the most recognizable ones! I scraped data from BFRO.net and let me tell you... the only thing messier than bigfoot's hair is trying to clean data without understanding the shifting structure of their site over the years! That said I appreciate the length of time they've gathered data and the depth of text!

Me dusting off this blog

I've recently been spending a good deal of time in Washington State, particularly Northern Washington where Bigfoot/Sasquatch is on EVERYTHING. I asked my partner and she said that there are tons of sightings in that region of WA so I figured I'd see if she was right. Full disclosure, as WA is her home and she has a Bigfoot hoodie she's a little biased! 

So below you can see my partner was COMPLETELY right... Below you'll find numbers by State, County, and Nearest Town (which can be linked to multiple counties etc). Then of course a map and pie charts representing class of sighting ("A" being the most 'real' sightings, to "C" which can be 'heard a noise') and then the seasons of sightings so you can figure out where you need to go if you want to stay warm and hunt Bigfoot sightings (hint, southern US).

Also since we're talking about Bigfoot... Remember Harry and The Hendersons?! John Lithgow was in that! Interestingly enough, even though popular culture references to cryptids tend to increase reports of sightings Harry and The Henderstons did not. The 1980's as a decade had the largest overall lull in Bigfoot sightings (which you can look at in the viz below) but they picked back up in the early 1990's for a reason I'll go into on a future blog post.

Pretty sure this movie gave me nightmares

Now let's look at some more data below. I wanted to do more of a heatmap look at the US and when you zoom out one of the things that is crazy is Florida really does become an obvious place to look for our large-footed friend! Also if you're looking for details of particular events the below dashboard will let you select points in time or highlight map areas (also remember to use the map search at the top left of the map itself) to filter the details to just the values you're interested in reading or clicking through to read more detail on the actual site.

Florida in 2012 was clearly like
a little shining dong on America

Also given one of my best friends just moved to the sunshine state I figured I should warn him that perhaps it's the proximity to sasquatches make people a little nutty, the 2012 spike in sightings (the largest currently on record) can largely be attributed to the sunshine state. It appears even cryptids need to retire! As always if you have any questions or concerns hit me up on twitter @wjking0

Bugs had the right solution to the Bigfoot problem in FL