The smell of fear..

We've been talking about infrasound (and I'll have more to say about that later), but let's not forget that another theory used to explain the extreme fear reaction people have during bigfoot encounters is that the creature releases certain pheromones that act upon us to create fear. I just found an article that discusses our own (US) defense department's attempt to discover a "fear hormone" to use against human beings. Possibly, bigfoot has already found this by way of natural selection.

Here's the "money graph":

Pheromones are effective in minute quantities, so a wide area can be blanketed with just a few liters. Given sufficient concentration, would everyone exposed start suffering from an unidentifiable dread? The contagious aspect means that those affected would start churning out fear pheromone as well.

On its own, the alarm pheromone probably would not do much. But given an external trigger, such as a loud noise, it could influence people to start stampeding like spooked cattle.

Given we already know that bigfoot will deliberately make some big sounds when humans are nearby, ie, branch snaps, yells, screams, or do things that are frightening enough in themselves, though they turn out to be harmless, like throwing rocks or shaking trees, could these behaviors be part of a strategy to cause inordinate fear? With the help of either infrasound, or pheromones, or both, adding in the noise or other frightening stimulus might be enough to send us all out of the woods in a hurry.