Before you say Bigfoot footage is rare because "in the panic of the moment" people forget to grab their camera, or forget to focus it, or forget to hold it still enough to actually capture something... well, to that, I say think about all the TV shows like "Max-X" or "Craziest Videos"... where people catch AMAZING and TERRIFYING events on tape so consistently that the shows can run for several seasons without repetition. I'm talking about people who thought to grab their camera, turn it on, focus it, AND hold it steady enough to record unbroken video WHILE airplanes crash down next to them, while cars spiral out of control in their direction, while people point guns at their heads, while fires rage around them, while animals exhibit crazed behavior and nearly trample them, while explosions shake the ground beneath them.... etc, etc. But the sight of a big hairy creature is apparently just too much for any one of thousands of people who claim to have "sighted" bigfoot to snap a few crystal clear, well composed, NORMAL-looking photographs with a quality at least as good as what a 3-year-old might take with a disposable camera.
And another question... Doesn't it seem suspicious that the foremost "authorities" of the Bigfoot issue tend to profit (sometimes just a little; sometimes in tens of thousands of dollars; sometimes in consistent royalties) from perpetuating the "authenticity" of their findings and cultivating continued interest? Doesn't it seem strange that you can find literally hundreds of people who claim to have confirmed a real link between Bigfoot and UFOs, trans-dimensional portals, telepathic communication, and (in the weirdest reports) sexual encounters? And why is it NOT the case that people don't more seriously question the psychological reasons a person might "witness" or report a Bigfoot encounter? Money is one motive. (Some footage has been reportedly sold to the media for tens of thousands of dollars). Fame is another motive. (If you can't be an "expert" in an established field, why not cultivate expertise in your own field by inventing it? Experts on sorcery and magic in the 16th century did this aplenty... hence the hundreds of compendiums describing a "scientific" explication of magical rituals and phenomenon). Simple attention is another motive. (It's comforting to have someone believe in your experience, even if your experience is one you make up yourself. A great pleasure can be drawn from creating a fiction that others come to believe in, and beyond that, should you ever consider confessing the hoax later, you have a compelling motive to maintain the fiction--namely, not wanting to let down the people who believed in you for so long). Boredom is another motive. (Think how many Internet reports turn out to be scams from kids who were "just messing around" or "just joking for the fun of it.") I haven't even begun to hit on the host of possible deep-seated psychological problems which might fuel false reports, hallucinations, confusion and misperception, etc.
I'm not trying to burst anyone's bubble here. I'm just trying to say that this whole issue really appears like a house of cards, built on a cloud, floating in a wind tunnel of doubts.... just waiting to be toppled. Folklore becomes rumor, rumor piques superstition and fear, superstition and fear invite misperception and false report, misperception and false report lend energy to curiosity, curiosity pushes us to go looking for what we want and hope to find, and the wanting and hoping to find begins to color our perceptions to a point where we begin forcing our interpretations to fit our desires... we see what we want to see, and we justify it all (in the end) with an idealistic appeal to "the importance of faith" or "what we know in our hearts to be true" or "what so many thousands of people simply could not get wrong" etc., etc., etc.
In the end, we're talking about faith in a big hairy creature here... one for which no direct forensic evidence can be supplied except for that "evidence" which cannot be identified as anything else (Hence the faulty logic: "if this sample of hair or that sample of bone cannot be identified as a known specimen, then it MUST belong to Bigfoot!"). Yes, the giant squid was recently captured on film, alive and well... but we've always had at least dead specimens of the giant squid (found in the stomachs of whales) to confirm its existence. Where is there any truly compelling evidence for Bigfoot that is more than a speculation, built on another speculation, informed by a legend?