Bigfoot Hunters Speak: 130 Interviews Reveal the Truth

Bigfoot Hunters Speak: 130 Interviews Reveal the Truth Behind the Legend

The image is iconic. In 1967, deep within the Northern California woods, a grainy film captured a 7-foot-tall, ape-like figure covered in dark fur, walking upright. The creature even turned to look directly into the camera. This footage has been endlessly replicated in popular culture – it’s now even an emoji! But what was it? A carefully constructed hoax? A misidentified bear? Or genuine evidence of a mysterious, undiscovered species known as Bigfoot? This question has fueled decades of fascination and investigation.

The Enduring Mystery of Bigfoot

The infamous Patterson-Gimlin film has been analyzed and re-analyzed countless times. While many dismiss it as a fabrication, a dedicated group of believers argue it has never been definitively debunked. These individuals, often referred to as “Bigfooters,” venture into the forests of Washington, California, Oregon, Ohio, Florida, and beyond, tirelessly searching for evidence of this elusive creature. But what drives this persistent pursuit?

Sociologists Jamie Lewis and Andrew Bartlett sought to understand the motivations behind this community. They embarked on a research project to uncover why people would dedicate significant time and resources to searching for a creature whose existence is highly improbable. During the COVID-19 lockdowns, Lewis began interviewing over 130 Bigfooters (and a handful of academics) about their beliefs, experiences, and investigative practices. This research culminated in their recent book, “Bigfooters and Scientific Inquiry: On the Borderlands of Legitimate Science.”

Uncovering the Motivations: An Academic Investigation

We spoke with Lewis and Bartlett about their fascinating academic investigation into the world of Bigfoot hunting.

What initially sparked your interest in the Bigfoot community?

Lewis: “It started when I was watching either the Discovery Channel or Animal Planet and a show called Finding Bigfoot was advertised. I was really keen to know why this program was being scheduled on what certainly at the time was a nominally serious and sober natural history channel. The initial plan was to do an analysis of these television programmes, but we felt that wasn’t enough. It was lockdown and my wife was pregnant and in bed a lot with sickness, so I needed to fill my time.”

Bartlett: “One of the things that I worked on when Jamie and I shared an office in Cardiff was a sociological study of fringe physicists – people mostly outside of academic institutions trying to do science. I was interviewing these people, going to their conferences. And that led relatively smoothly into Bigfoot, but it was Jamie’s interest in Bigfoot that brought me to this field.”

How large is the Bigfoot hunting community?

Lewis: “It’s very hard to put a number on it. There is certainly a divide between what are known as “apers,” who believe that Bigfoot is just a primate unknown to science, and those that are perhaps more derogatorily called “woo-woos,” who believe that Bigfoot is some sort of interdimensional traveller, an alien of sort. We’re talking in the thousands of people. But there are a couple of hundred really serious people of which I probably interviewed at least half.”

Recent data supports this claim. A YouGov survey conducted in November 2025, revealed that as many as one quarter of Americans believe that Bigfoot either definitely or probably exists. This demonstrates a surprisingly widespread belief in the creature’s potential reality.

Were the interviewees initially skeptical of your intentions?

Lewis: “I think there was definitely a worry that they would be caricatured. And I was often asked, “Do I believe in Bigfoot?” I had a standard answer that Andy and I agreed on, which was that mainstream, institutional science says there is absolutely no compelling evidence that Bigfoot exists. We have no reason to dissent with that consensus. But as sociologists what does exist is a community (or communities) of Bigfooting, and that’s what interests us.”

Bartlett: “One of the things that at least a couple of people reacted to once the book was published was the way we phrased that. On the blurb on the back of the book we say something along the lines of “Bigfoot exists if not as a physical biological creature then certainly as an object around which hundreds of people organise their lives.” A couple of people took that to be some kind of slight against them. It wasn’t.”

Demographics and Shared Traits of Bigfoot Hunters

Do Bigfooters share any common personality traits or backgrounds?

Lewis: “The community is very white, male, rural, and blue collar—often ex-military. I think Bigfooting is growing among the female population, but there’s a sense of the kind of ‘masculine hunter in the dark’ persona.”

Bartlett: “In America, you find a lot more veterans in the general population. But I think there’s also the issue of how they like to present themselves, because when you’re dealing with witness testimony, you’ve got to present yourself as credible. If you can say something like, “I was in the service” or “I was in the armed forces,” then at least you’re not likely to be spooked by a moose.”

Challenging Stereotypes and Unexpected Findings

What surprised you most about the Bigfooters you interviewed? Did they challenge any preconceived notions?

Lewis: “Some were very articulate, which did surprise me a little. I guess that’s my own prejudice. I was also very surprised about how open people were; I expected them to not tell me about their encounters. But a fair few of them did. Many of them wanted to be named in the book. I was also surprised about how much empirical data they collect and how much they attempt to try and analyse and make sense of it. And how they were willing to admit that a certain idea was bunk or a hoax. I expected them to be defending bad evidence.”

Bartlett: “There are extracts of this in our book, people saying “I was fooled by these tracks for ages. I thought they were real and then I found this and that and the other out about it and I revised my opinion.” So that did surprise me too.”

Is the evidence collected by Bigfooters considered scientific?

Bartlett: “When you’re working in institutional science you’re working to get grants, you’re working to get good quality publications. You might want your name associated with particular ideas, but you do that through peer-reviewed papers and by working with PhD students who go off to other labs. In Bigfooting, you’ve got self-published books, you’ve got Bigfoot conferences, you’ve got YouTube channels, you’ve got podcasts and things like this, and they’re not necessarily a good way of making and testing knowledge claims. This is an aspect where Bigfooting is quite different to mainstream science.”

“It was interesting to study the fringe physicists and seeing where the common deviation from science was. And that’s a focus on individualism; the idea that an individual alone can collect and assess evidence in some kind of asocial fashion. The physicists I studied were quite clear that ideas like consensus in science were dangerous, when in reality, consensus, continuity, and community are the basis of most of science.”

The Nature of Evidence in the Bigfoot Community

What types of evidence are most commonly presented by Bigfooters?

Lewis: “Witness testimonies. Without those reported testimonies, Bigfooting would not exist. A large part of the work of a Bigfooter is to collect and make sense of these testimonies. They get upset when these testimonies don’t have much weight within institutional science. They’ll make the comparison to court and how testimonies alone can put someone on death row. So they don’t understand why testimonies don’t have much weight in science. Beyond the testimony, footprint evidence is probably the most famous and also the most pervasive sort of trace evidence.”

Bartlett: “One of the reasons footprints are so important is that there’s the legacy of the Yeti and footprint evidence which proved to be relatively persuasive, convincing some institutional scientists that there was something in the Himalayas. And then there was the fact that the sort of two major academic champions of Bigfoot were persuaded by the footprint evidence: the late Grover Krantz (around 1970) and Jeffrey Meldrum (in the 1990s).”

Lewis: “These days, you also see camera traps, audio recorders, even DNA testing of hairs and those sorts of things. They’re capturing anomalous sounds and often blurry images. Some believe that a Bigfoot communicates through infrasound, although that is certainly disputed within the community. So what you’re getting now is more and more different types of evidence.”

How can the authenticity of images or sounds be verified?

Bartlett: “What they do is go out into the forest and record a sound, for example, and compare it to databases of birds and other animals. And they may find there is nothing that matches it. Is it something that doesn’t sound like a car or a person or a bear or a moose? In which case, there’s the space for Bigfoot. And it’s the same with images to some degree.”

Is this interpretive process a weakness in their evidence?

Lewis: “It allows them to create space for Bigfoot. Because if you can’t match it to something else, what could it be? You have this absence and then from that absence you create a presence. They believe it’s a scientific argument. In fact, it’s kind of interesting how Bigfooters will always enrol other kinds of magical beasts to strengthen the case for Bigfoot. So, one sentence I hear quite a lot is “it ain’t no unicorn.”

The Hierarchy and Potential for Collaboration

Is there a hierarchy within the Bigfoot community?

Lewis: “A-listers tend to be anyone associated with academia. So Andy’s already mentioned Jeff Meldrum, unfortunately he passed away very recently, but he was their route to contemporary academia. So in any conference, if Jeff Meldrum was speaking, he’d be last. Anyone who’s on TV, such as the Finding Bigfoot and the Expedition Bigfoot presenters would also be in the A-list category. And then you’ve got various different groups just below. For example, the Bigfoot Field Researchers Organization, which is probably the most well-known group.”

What can scientists and Bigfooters learn from each other?

Lewis: “From reading books and from discussing it with people, there was a sense that Bigfooters are anti-science. We did not find that. What we argue in the book is that they’re not anti-science. In fact, I would say a lot of them are pro-science, but they’re counter-establishment. I think academia should be thinking about these people as citizen scientists and what they’re doing as a kind of gateway into understanding your local area.”

“For example, they found an animal, I think it was a pine marten, on a camera trap that was not supposed to be in the area. So they are collecting lots of data. They are not irrational. It’s different from, for example, ghost hunting, because you don’t have to imagine there’s something entirely new in the world. It’s just an animal that exists out there that hasn’t been found. Implausible, yes. But not impossible. What they do lack, however, is academic discipline; anyone can be a Bigfooter.”

A Compelling Encounter

Lewis: “Did I get caught up in the moment? Sometimes, of course, you do, just as you do in a film. If you’re in the pitch dark night and you’re watching a horror film, you take it away with you for a while until you settle back down. I often went to bed buzzing, thinking I don’t know what I just heard; they were great stories at the end of the day. But I learned to separate the interview from my thoughts on the interview.”

Convincing Others of a Bigfoot Sighting

Lewis: “A lot of Bigfooters would begin with qualifiers like, “My dad doesn’t believe in Bigfoot,” or “I have questioned myself for years thinking about this incident and what it was.” So, they would set themselves up as a rational, logical individual. That then created a connection between me and them. And of course, I’d probably be doing the same.”

Bartlett: “If I were to encounter Bigfoot, I would probably draw on all the techniques of proving that I’m a credible, hard-headed, rational person that we see in those witness encounters. I would expect to be disbelieved. And so therefore I would stress I was putting my credibility as an academic on the line here. So I’d deploy all those kinds of rhetorical techniques that are used by Bigfooters, aside from just the description of the encounter.”

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Jamie Lewis is a Lecturer in sociology at Cardiff University and Andy Bartlett is a Research Associate in Sociology at the University of Sheffield. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.