A huge, hairy beast was sitting by a mountain stream as two men rode up on horses. When the horses saw the beast, they panicked and threw the riders. One man managed to yank a movie camera out of his saddlebag. He filmed the creature as it strolled into the woods. The blurry image you saw on the previous page was shot on that autumn day in 1967, deep in the mountains of northern California. The men made plaster casts of footprints the creature left in the mud. At least that's what the men said happened.

Some scientists say the film and footprints are fakes. Others believe they're genuine. For years people have reported seeing glimpses of a similar creature in forests of North America. People in the United States call the creature Bigfoot for the huge footprints it leaves behind. In Canada it's called Sasquatch, from an Indian word for "wild people." There is no scientific evidence that Bigfoot exists. No one has ever caught a Bigfoot or found a dead one or even a skeleton. But people still search for it, as they do for other legendary monsters in Europe, Asia, and Africa.