A group of high school students believe they may have stumbled upon Bigfoot while in the Idaho wilderness for a class project.

The teenagers were in the woods near Mink Creek in Franklin County when they said they noticed a dark creature watching them from a ridge.

One of the students managed to grab his camera to film the large figure retreating between the trees.

The group then raced to the point they had seen the creature, and said they found a large foot imprint in the dirt and took a photograph of it.

“It just didn’t look human-like,” the student who recorded the footage and who does not wish to be identified told Local News 8.

“I don’t know what that is, it’s not a bear, it’s not a moose or anything. It was big and bulky and black.”

He went on: “I’m not going to say yes it was a Bigfoot or no it wasn’t, because I don’t know, and nobody knows.”

The teenagers were in the woods near Mink Creek in Franklin County when they said they noticed a dark creature watching them from a ridge

The news station took the footage and the image of the large foot to Jeff Meldrum, a Sasquatch expert at Idaho State University.

While he could not be certain of what the creature was, “it nevertheless is a large dark figure that bears resemblance to descriptions of Sasquatch”, he said.

He explained that although the beast is often rumored to be living in the Northwest of North America, there is also local Bigfoot lore.

He said it has been documented by “immigrants coming into this new frontier and encountering strange and marvelous things including stories of wild men and mountain devils”.

He was joined in his office by anatomist Trent Stephens, who said the beast resembled that seen by Roger Patterson in a famous 1967 clip taken on the Klamath River in California.

“I was just dumb-founded,” Trent Stephens said.

“That arm swaying is exactly like the Patterson film.”

He added: “There’s always room for a hoax, but this was pretty amazing.”

Bigfoot is allegedly an ape-like creature said to inhabit forests mainly in the Northwest, but his existence has not been scientifically proven.

There have been scores of sightings, including in Spokane, Washington in May 2011, when a woman hiker captured a large figure on camera and uploaded the footage to YouTube.

The Animal Planet show Finding Bigfoot will visit Pocatello, Idaho next month to investigate the claims that Bigfoot could be in the area.

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THE MYSTERY OF BIGFOOT

Bigfoot, also known as Sasquatch, is described as a hairy, ape-like creature purportedly living in forests, mainly in the Northwest of North America.

Scientists have rejected the beast’s existence, and sightings are widely considered to be either misidentification or hoaxes.

Yet some scientists, including Idaho State University’s Jeff Meldrum, have taken interest in further investigations into sightings.

The most famous sighting of the beast was in 1967, with footage taken of a seven-foot-tall, hairy biped by Roger Patterson on the Klamath River in California.

Images have been taken more recently, including by hunter Rick Jacobs in 2007 who captured a beast using a camera attached to a tree. It was dismissed as a “bear with mange”.