The Washington Post thinks Bigfoot is an upright walking bear...

This unretouched image is part of a frame from several seconds of film shot in Del Norte County, Calif., in 1967. It’s one of the scraps of physical evidence of the possible existence of Bigfoot, alias Sasquatch. 

The Washington Post says: As we reported last week, a large, dark and very hairy beast has been seen walking on its hind legs through New Jersey neighborhoods for the third summer in a row. It’s clear that this being is no human. What could it be?

In this case, video captured by locals has shown that this particular furry walker is a black bear — one nicknamed Pedals for his bipedal gait, which he uses because his front paws are injured.

[Pedals, a bear that walks upright, is back — and so is the fight about helping him]

But the strange sight prompted more than one Washington Post employee and reader to ask this question: Could the thousands of reported sightings of bigfoot over the years actually have been walking bears?

People discussing Pedals on Reddit asked or concluded the same thing. So did people on Twitter.

We here at Animalia aren’t authorities on Bigfoot, nor do we vouch for its existence. So we reached out to the experts for some analysis. Bigfoot experts, that is.

And their response could be described as a big, collective eye roll. It turns out that bigfoot believers have heard this idea a million times — because Pedals isn’t the first bear to be seen walking upright — and they have responses ready to shoot it down.

Here’s what Matt Moneymaker, the president of the Bigfoot Field Researchers’ Organization and host of Animal Planet’s “Finding Bigfoot,” told us in an e-mail:

Could this explain bigfoot sightings? The short answer is “no”, not even a little bit. The BFRO has collected thousands of bigfoot-related observations over the years. In not one of those observations was it noted that the witness spotted a figure they thought was a bigfoot but it turned out to be a bear walking on hind legs for an extended period. That would happen quite a bit if it explained even a fraction of bigfoot sightings. On the other hand, it is quite common for witnesses to initially think an upright furry figure is a bear on hind legs until the car gets closer and they realize it is an ape-like figure — a bigfoot (a type of ape).

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