Bigfoot / Sasquatch

The full file

In the autumn of 1976 Peter Byrne, director of the Bigfoot Information Center and Exhibition in The Dalles, Oregon, asked the FBI to identify a tuft of hair he believed might belong to Bigfoot. The Bureau's laboratory agreed, examined it early in 1977 and concluded that the hairs came from the deer family. The exchange sat in an FBI file for more than four decades until the Bureau published it on its online reading room, the FBI Records Vault, on 5 June 2019.

What was reported, and by whom

The correspondence did not begin with a sample but with a rumour. On 6 July 1975 the Washington Star-News printed a short item on the Washington Environmental Atlas, a US Army Corps of Engineers publication, which included an entry on Sasquatch. According to an internal FBI memorandum, the atlas stated that "a sample of reputed Sasquatch hair was analyzed by the FBI and found to belong to no known animal".

On 26 August 1976 Byrne wrote to the Bureau asking it to "set the record straight, once and for all" about that claim. His centre was backed by the Academy of Applied Science in Boston, which also sponsored searches at Loch Ness. Jay Cochran Jr, the assistant director in charge of the laboratory, replied on 10 September that he could find no record of any such examination. The memorandum adds that the atlas's editor, contacted in Seattle, could not trace his own source.

Byrne wrote again on 24 November 1976 asking for a comparative analysis of about fifteen hairs attached to "a tiny piece of skin". It was, he wrote, the first material in six years that his group thought might matter. His letters do not say where the hair was found. Speaking to Willamette Week in 2019, he said it had been caught on tree bark and a thornbush on Fir Mountain, on the east side of the Hood River Valley. Other 2019 reports, drawing on his interviews with the Washington Post and the Seattle Times, say he collected it after two US Forest Service employees reported seeing an unidentified upright creature; they do not name the place.

The evidence and where it is held

What survives is paper. The FBI file, numbered 95-213013, runs to 22 pages: letters, memoranda, press cuttings, and two photocopied images of the hairs beside a metric scale. Some names, including the examining special agent's, are redacted. The file is held by the FBI and published on the Vault.

The hair itself was returned. Cochran's result went not to Byrne but to Howard S. Curtis, the Academy's executive vice president, who had delivered the sample by hand and asked for the reply because Byrne would be abroad for several months. The letter states that the sample was being returned with it. No source consulted here records what became of it afterwards.

What investigators concluded

An internal memorandum of 13 December 1976 recommended that the request be granted "in interest of research and scientific inquiry", adding that it was no change of policy. Cochran wrote to Byrne on 15 December agreeing to examine the material.

The result is set out in Cochran's letter to Curtis dated 24 February 1977. The hairs were examined by transmitted and incident light microscopy; the laboratory studied root structure, medullary structure, cuticle thickness and scale casts, and compared the hairs directly with hairs of known origin under a comparison microscope. The conclusion: "the hairs are of deer family origin." An internal memorandum dated 22 February records the same finding. On 8 March 1977 Curtis thanked Cochran and wrote that Byrne, then expected back from Nepal, would receive copies of the correspondence.

The conventional explanation

The finding itself is the explanation: the hair came from a member of the deer family, caught on vegetation in forest where deer are common. Its strength is that it fits the setting and a wider pattern. When a 2014 genetic study led by Bryan Sykes at Oxford sequenced hair submitted as anomalous primate material, the eighteen American samples all matched known animals, mostly black bears, dogs or coyotes, and cows; one, from Washington state, was white-tailed or mule deer. Byrne himself told Willamette Week in 2019 that "it very probably was" deer hair.

Its weakness is method. The 1977 examination was microscopic only, with no DNA test, and "deer family" is a family-level answer, not a species. FBI microscopic hair comparison was later shown to have been overstated in court: in April 2015 the Bureau and the Justice Department reported erroneous statements in at least 90 per cent of reviewed trial testimony. That review concerned claims linking human hair to individual defendants, a harder and different question from telling deer hair from primate hair, but it is a reason not to treat the 1977 result as more precise than it says.

What remains unexplained or disputed

The finding applies to fifteen hairs, not to the wider Bigfoot record. Whether Byrne ever saw it is disputed. The file shows a copy addressed to him and Curtis promising to forward the correspondence, yet in 2019 Byrne said he "never heard back" and that the FBI had hidden the result; the released pages bear no security classification. Where the hair came from is told differently in different 2019 accounts. The source of the atlas's earlier claim that the FBI had found hair belonging "to no known animal" was never traced. Byrne died in Tillamook, Oregon, on 28 July 2023, aged 97.

Sources

• Bigfoot, FBI Records: The Vault (archived) — Federal Bureau of Investigation, released 2019 (documents 1975–77). The full correspondence, memoranda, method and the "deer family origin" conclusion, read in the scanned file itself.
• FBI releases documents from Bigfoot investigation, finding hair and tissue belonged to deer (archived) — Danny Clemens, ABC7 News, 2019. The 5 June 2019 release and the 22-page, August 1976 to March 1977 span.
• Did Peter Byrne really find Bigfoot hair and skin? (archived) — Peter Hess, Inverse, 2019. Byrne's 2019 account to the Washington Post and CNBC, including the Forest Service sighting.
• Was it really Bigfoot in Oregon? (archived) — Hannah Chinn, Willamette Week, 2019. Fir Mountain as the collection site, and Byrne's view that he never heard back.
• Man who sent FBI physical evidence of 'Bigfoot' waited 43 years to learn they took him seriously (archived) — Austin Williams, FOX 2 Detroit, 2019. Byrne's Seattle Times account of the two Forest Service witnesses.
• Genetic analysis of hair samples attributed to yeti, bigfoot and other anomalous primates (archived) — Sykes et al., Proceedings of the Royal Society B, 2014. The eighteen US samples and their species matches, including one deer.
• FBI testimony on microscopic hair analysis contained errors in at least 90 percent of cases in ongoing review (archived) — FBI press release, 20 April 2015. The later review of FBI microscopic hair testimony.
• Peter Cyril Byrne, 1925–2023 (archived) — Royal Geographical Society, 2023. Byrne's dates and place of death.