A first pass: Simple dot map of all sightings
Looking at this map, there are areas that stand out as having a high concentration of sightings. The highest concentration is in Washington state, which is known for having the most bigfoot sightings in the country.
It is clear that these sightings don't correlate with population (for example, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and the eastern seaboard are severely underrepresented). There are also regions with few sightings that one would expect to have several, such as Maine, although every state except Hawaii reported at least one sighting. Hawaii is not a surprising outlier; as a very remote volcanic island chain with no native land mammals, it wouldn't be plausible for the bigfoot species to exist there. Therefore, it wouldn't be logical for anyone to report a sighting.
In fact, there are several areas with higher density that appear to correspond with mountain ranges, in the Pacific Northwest, California, Colorado, and the Appalachians. A logical hypothesis is that most bigfoot sightings occur in mountainous areas.
Click any dot to read about that sighting
Examining the mountain hypothesis: Sighting density compared to topography
This map shows the distribution of bigfoot sightings as an isopleth map over a terrain map of the United States.
As you can see, most bigfoot sightings do take place in mountainous areas, such as in the Cascade Mountains in Washington, the Sierra Nevada Mountains in California, and in the Appalachian Mountains in North Carolina and Virginia.
However, there are several areas with a high density of sightings and no mountains to speak of, such as Florida and Ohio.
Outlier #1: Ohio
This map shows the density distribution of bigfoot sightings in Ohio. There are two areas with a high density of sightings. These areas are centered over Salt Fork State Park and Beaver Creek State Park.
Salt Fork State Park is well known for its bigfoot sightings and has appeared on such TV shows as "Finding Bigfoot", "Monsters and Mysteries in America", and "Monster Quest". In 2012, Salt Creek State Park was one of USA Today's Top Ten "Squatchiest" Places.
Beaver Creek State Park is also a well known hotspot for bigfoot sightings. The park hosts an annual Bigfoot Day in December, and most of the park's yearly sightings of bigfoot occur over this weekend.
One cannot know definitively whether these parks celebrate bigfoot due to an usual number of sightings in the area, or if people report an unusual number of sightings in this area because they visit for bigfoot celebrations and expect to see the creature.
Outlier #2: Florida
Like Ohio, the highest density areas correlate with protected natural areas. However, the hub in southern Florida is centered on the Skunk Ape Research Headquarters, a center dedicated to studying the legendary, Florida-specific creature described as a "distant relative" of bigfoot.
We found less explanation for the other bigfoot hotspots in Florida. Perhaps the unexplored regions and dense undergrowth of Florida's wilderness lends itself to sightings of ambiguous nature.
Looking at the language: "Bigfoot" versus "Sasquatch"
For each state, we counted the number of occurrences of the two main names for the creature in question, "bigfoot" and "sasquatch". Each state is colored by the percent of these total mentions where the word "bigfoot" was used: (#bigfoot)/(#bigfoot + #sasquatch)
Nearly every state has more instances of "bigfoot" than "sasquatch", with the exception of Connecticut. New England as a region has a surprising amount of variation, with Connecticut at one extreme and all of northern New England using "bigfoot" exclusively.
The one area that seems to trend overall toward more uses of "sasquatch" than the rest of the country is the northwestern states, including Alaska. This linguistic trend is clarified by a quick Wikipedia exploration, revealing that the word "sasquatch" comes from Halkomelem, an indigenous language spoken in British Columbia near the border with Washington. So it makes sense that despite the US's preference for "bigfoot", people living near the origin of the word "sasquatch" use it more often.
Sentence Tree
Answering the question of why people see bigfoot is much more difficult. This text tree tool offers a structured way to explore the language used in individual accounts following mentions of a given keyword.
For each word in the dropdown menu, we mapped all the words and phrases that follow a given word and their frequency. The root word is seen on the left and the top 20 words that follow that word are seen on the right with their frequency. If you select a word from the right side of the tree, it will become the root node, and it will be added to the phrase being constructed under the dropdown menu. The count in parantheses next to this phrase indicates the number of occurrences of this phrase in the descriptions of bigfoot sightings.
For example, if you select "7" and build the phrase "7 to 8 feet tall," you can see that it appears 28 times. Similarly, if you select "i" and build the sentence "i was driving home from work," you can see that this phrase appears 9 times.
These high frequency phrases can give us some insight into similarities between bigfoot experiences.
To navigate the tree, click on a leaf node to advance and add a word to the sentence, or the root node to go back and remove the root word.