The hunt for Bigfoot sounds like the opposite of good science, but those pursuing the creature are often serious empiricists

by Andrew Bartlett & Jamie Lewis  BIO

A backpacker from Vancouver, Washington, took these photos on Silver Star Mountain outside Yacolt, Washington, on 17 November 2005. Courtesy the BFRO

is a sociologist of science based at the University of Sheffield in the UK, who has written on contemporary biomedical science, the alcohol industry and public health, and fringe physics. His latest book, co-authored with Jamie Lewis, is Bigfooters and Scientific Inquiry: On the Borderlands of Legitimate Science (2026). He is currently working on the Wellcome Trust-funded project ‘The Fuel That Feeds the Flames’: Chronic Inflammation and Shifting Conceptualisations of Disease.

is a reader in sociology at Cardiff University in Wales, UK. His latest book, co-authored with Andrew Bartlett, is Bigfooters and Scientific Inquiry: On the Borderlands of Legitimate Science (2026). His current work is combining science and technology studies research with cultural sociology to advance work in the sociology of mystery.

Edited byRichard Fisher

How do you go about capturing a monster? The search for Bigfoot, or Sasquatch – often referred to as Bigfooting – may sound like a whimsical endeavour: an activity of tall tales and cartoonish representations. Yet if you spend time listening to what Bigfooters themselves have to say, you discover a different picture.

We did exactly that. To research our book, Bigfooters and Scientific Inquiry: On the Borderlands of Legitimate Science (2026), we conducted more than 160 interviews, mostly with classical Bigfooters, who spend time in the forests of North America, collecting evidence and, as they see it, acting responsibly, rationally and scientifically.

As sociologists of science, we began with a simple premise: whatever one thinks about whether Bigfoot actually exists as a biological creature, Bigfooting undeniably does. If Bigfooting is a community – or set of communities – that are collecting, analysing, sharing, validating and contesting evidence, then Bigfooting is a suitable object of sociological enquiry. And so, we went on our own hunt to track down Bigfooters and make sense of how they themselves make sense of the world.

Before we began our sociological exploration of Bigfooting, we were cautioned that Bigfooters were anti-science. The truth is much more complex. Yes, Bigfooters work in opposition to mainstream institutional science, making claims about the world that do not accord with the scientific consensus. However, our research revealed that Bigfooters are not dismissive of scientific principles. In fact, many are dedicated empiricists who employ methodologies modelled on those found in professional scientific research. As George Eberhart, a cryptozoologist and Bigfooter, explained to us: ‘It’s not a part of mainstream science, it really isn’t. But you can apply a scientific method, or a journalistic method to it, to get some good science out of it.’

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Yet Bigfooters are not ‘citizen scientists’ in the way we might be familiar with, due to their counter-establishment orientation and alternative vision of what ‘good’ science means. To a degree, the Bigfooter scientific model echoes that of the natural philosophers of previous centuries, in which individualism was valorised, and where testimony, anecdote and personal experience carried evidential weight.

So, how do contemporary Bigfooters use scientific technologies and techniques in their pursuit of evidence – and, ultimately, proof? And what makes their commitment to empiricism different from mainstream science?

Following our interviews, one particular line stuck with us as an apt description of the empirical Bigfooter’s mindset. It came from Cliff Barackman, the presenter of the US TV series Finding Bigfoot (2011-) and the owner of the North American Bigfoot Center in Boring, Oregon. ‘There is this foolish statement, that is still thrown around, that there is no evidence for Bigfoot,’ Barackman said. ‘There’s plenty of evidence, there’s no proof. There’s a big difference.’

Bigfooters have collected thousands of witness testimonies, cast hundreds of footprints, recorded scores of howls

This is what we might call the Bigfooter’s lament, and maybe the most concise summary of the frustration – and perhaps sadness – that Bigfooters experience when it comes to making empirical claims for Bigfoot’s existence.

Because there is ‘plenty of evidence’; Bigfooters have collected thousands of witness testimonies, cast hundreds of footprints, recorded scores of howls, and have even captured the occasional photograph or video. Of course, none of these are convincing if starting from the position that Bigfoot does not exist as a biological creature.

Bigfooters are thus faced with an evidential challenge that cannot be resolved with witness testimonies, photos, footprints or recorded sounds and groans. Implicitly and explicitly, both the general public and the scientific community make a simple request: Habeas corpus. Show the body.

‘On the side of science, they’re absolutely right. “Where’s the body? Where are the bones?” That’s what everybody asks, right?’ says Les Stroud, creator of the Canadian TV series Survivorman (2005-), which focused on Bigfoot for a season in 2015.

Over the decades, bodies have been presented, but these are almost unanimously considered to be hoaxes. For example, in the 1960s, the promoter Frank Hansen showcased a hairy humanoid figure encased in ice, initially supposedly found in Siberia and dubbed the Sibirskoye Creature, but more commonly known as the Minnesota Iceman. It had dubious provenance, but some took it seriously. Bernard Heuvelmans and Ivan T Sanderson, two of the founders of cryptozoology, examined the ‘body’, and wrote rival papers. In 1969, Heuvelmans published his description in Bulletin de L’Institut Royal des Sciences Naturelles de Belgique in which he claimed it was a new species, Homo pongoides, while Sanderson........

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