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June 1764. A young woman tending cattle in the Mercoire Forest near Langogne saw a beast come at her. "Like a wolf, yet not a wolf." Her herd defended her.

September 12, 1952. Flatwoods, West Virginia. Three boys watched a bright object cross the evening sky and seem to come down on a hillside farm. Kathleen May led a group up the hill, among them a 17-year-old National Guardsman and the family dog. Near the top, a red light pulsed. They walked into a foul-smelling mist.

April 1934. A London surgeon was on the north shore of Loch Ness. Robert Kenneth Wilson said he noticed a considerable commotion on the surface, perhaps two or three hundred yards out. Then something broke the surface. A small head. A slender neck, swan-like, rising about three feet above the loch. He made four exposures. By then the object had completely disappeared.

November 15, 1966. Close to midnight. Two young couples from Point Pleasant, West Virginia, were in the TNT area, an old wartime munitions works north of town. Near the old power plant, they saw something. It was shaped like a man, six or seven feet tall, with wings. Its red eyes were six inches apart. They drove away fast. It followed, gliding over their car at about 100 miles an hour.

October 20, 1967. Early afternoon on Bluff Creek, deep in the Six Rivers National Forest of northern California. Two former rodeo riders from Yakima, Roger Patterson and Bob Gimlin, round an overturned tree on horseback. Across the creek, something is standing. The horses spook. Patterson grabs his rented 16 mm camera and runs.

April 21, 1977. Dover, Massachusetts. A quiet, wealthy town about 15 miles southwest of Boston. Bill Bartlett, 17, was driving north on Farm Street at about 10:30 p.m. His headlights caught something on a low stone wall. A small, hairless body. A huge melon-shaped head. Two glowing orange eyes.

January 1909. Fresh snow lay across South Jersey. Then the tracks appeared. Hoof-like prints went over fences, across backyards and up onto rooftops, and stopped in the middle of open fields.

June 29, 1988. Browntown Road, through Scape Ore Swamp outside Bishopville, South Carolina. Seventeen-year-old Christopher Davis was driving home from a night shift at McDonald's when a tire went flat. He changed it. Then he saw something coming out of the trees, kicking up dust as it ran.

Spring 1933. A couple were driving along the north shore of Loch Ness, near Abriachan Pier. The water was flat calm. Then it wasn't.

November 1951. High on the Nepal-Tibet watershed, three men come down from the Menlung La onto a glacier. In the snow lies a line of footprints. Large. Fresh. Leading down the ice.

July 11, 1972. Late afternoon on the rural edge of Louisiana, Missouri. Terry Harrison, 8, and his brother Wally, 5, were playing in the yard. Terry screamed.

Fall 1989. About 1:30 in the morning. Lorianne Endrizzi was driving home from work along Bray Road, outside Elkhorn, Wisconsin. Something was kneeling at the side of the road. It had pointed ears and long claws. It held what it was eating palms up. Its eyes glowed.

September 2000. A Bigfoot expedition is camped in the Gifford Pinchot National Forest of southern Washington. For several nights the team has broadcast a recorded scream into the dark. At about 3:00 AM, two of them leave fruit beside a rainwater puddle near Skookum Meadow. By morning, three of the six apples are gone.

Canóvanas, Puerto Rico. The second week of August 1995. Livestock had been dying across the island, and nobody knew why. Madelyne Tolentino was at her mother's house when she looked out of the window.

July 1924. Five prospectors from Kelso, Washington, were working a gold claim on the shoulder of Mount St. Helens. For a week the evenings brought a shrill whistling. Then a booming sound, like something hitting its own chest. Then came the night of the siege. Rocks rained on the cabin. Feet trampled outside. Something pushed on the door until the whole door shook.

6 August 1848. The South Atlantic, somewhere between the Cape of Good Hope and St Helena. The sky is dark and cloudy. A long swell runs under the frigate HMS Daedalus, homeward bound from the East Indies.

23 April 1960. Loch Ness. Aeronautical engineer Tim Dinsdale was on the last morning of a six-day watch, alone on a road high above Foyers Bay. Then he saw it. Through binoculars, a long oval hump lay on the water. A distinct mahogany colour. A huge dark blotch on its flank, "like the dapple on a cow."

September 1941. A sunny afternoon at a cabin above the Fraser River, near Ruby Creek, British Columbia. Jeannie Chapman's eldest boy ran inside. He said a cow was coming down out of the woods.

Easter, 1976. Two sisters were playing among the gravestones of an old church in Mawnan, Cornwall. June Melling was 12. Vicky was 9. A strange sound made them look up. Above the church tower, a large winged creature was hovering. A man, covered in feathers, with two large wings.

Venezuela. The forests south-west of Lake Maracaibo. A Swiss oil geologist named François de Loys is camped on a tributary of the Tarra River. Two large creatures approach. At first he takes them for bears. Then he sees them clearly. Hairy. Tailless. Ape-like. They howl, tear at branches and advance on the party. The men open fire. The female falls.

Spring 1983. Near South Molton, on the edge of Exmoor, a farmer counted his dead sheep. Throat wounds. By one account over 100 animals in three months. The story reached the national papers. The Daily Express offered a reward for footage. Then Devon police asked for help, and a team of Royal Marines snipers was sent from Lympstone to hunt the killer.

1891. Ben Macdui, the second-highest mountain in the British Isles. Norman Collie is coming down from the summit cairn. He is alone, in mist. Then he hears it. A crunch. Then another. Something is walking after him, taking steps three or four times the length of his own.

March 3, 1972. About 1:00 a.m. on an icy road outside Loveland, Ohio. Officer Ray Shockey saw something at the roadside and took it for a dog. Then it stood up. Three or four feet tall. Leathery skin. A face like a frog or a lizard. Its eyes caught his headlights. It climbed the guardrail and went down toward the Little Miami River.

May 1971. A rented frame house just outside Fouke, Arkansas. The Ford family had lived there less than a week. Late at night, Elizabeth Ford lay asleep on a couch in the front room. She saw the curtain move. Then a hand came through the screen window. It was covered in heavy hair. It had claws. Its eyes looked like coals of fire.

July 5, 1977. Around noon on the Vermont shore of Lake Champlain. Sandra Mansi watched the water stir like a school of fish. Then a head broke the surface. Then a neck. Then a back.

August 1817. Gloucester Harbor, Massachusetts. Something long and dark moved through the calm water off Cape Ann. Ship masters, merchants and a ship carpenter watched it play in circles, sink straight down and rise again two hundred yards away. One said its head was shaped like a sea turtle's. Another saw bunches along its back.

1968. A summer drive along Highway 97, beside Okanagan Lake in British Columbia. Art Folden and his wife saw something large and lifelike moving on the calm water. Folden pulled over and raised his home movie camera.

August 27, 1958. Morning on Bluff Creek Road, a timber road being cut into the Six Rivers National Forest of northern California. Bulldozer operator Jerry Crew found footprints around his machine. Big and manlike. Almost 16 inches long. Pressed deeply into the graded dirt.

1 May 1983. Lake Tele, deep in the swamps of northern Congo. At approximately 2:30 PM, zoologist Marcellin Agnagna and his guides from the village of Boha saw something in the water. A wide back. A long neck. A small head that turned from side to side, almost as if it was watching them.

Lawndale, Illinois. Monday, 25 July 1977. About 8:30 in the evening. Three boys were playing hide-and-seek in a backyard near Kickapoo Creek. Two large black birds came in from the south. They swooped at Travis Goodwin, who ran and jumped into a plastic swimming pool. Then one went for 10-year-old Marlon Lowe.

Sumatra. September 1994. British journalist Debbie Martyr had been out in the forests of Kerinci Seblat National Park for four months, on the trail of a creature known as the orang pendek. Then she saw it herself.

April 25, 1973. About 10 p.m. in Enfield, a village of some 750 people in southern Illinois. Henry McDaniel heard scratching at his door. He picked up a gun and a flashlight, thinking it might be a bear. What he saw instead had three legs, a short body, two little short arms and two pink eyes as big as flashlights. It stood four and a half feet tall. It was grayish.

January 1922. From Esquel, in the Andes of Chubut, an American prospector wrote to the director of the Buenos Aires Zoo. Martin Sheffield had followed tracks so deep that only something of ponderous weight could have made them. They led to a lagoon. In the middle of the water, he saw the head of an animal, with a huge neck like that of a swan. The swirls made him think its body must resemble a crocodile's.