This Is What Bigfoot Hair Looks Like

The Greenbrier River, West Virginia episode of Finding Bigfoot yielded some amazing, yet inconclusive evidence. Matt Moneymaker was handed a bag containing possible Sasquatch hairs from a couple who witnessed a Bigfoot walk by their car. On the show, Matt was stoked by the find. "These are squatchers... are very fine hairs. It's the first time the hairs were found where they had a sighting where two witnesses saw it," Matt said.

The hairs were later sent to a lab in Oklahoma City and the test results came back as inconclusive. Because of the age of the samples and how it was stored, the lab had trouble extracting any viable DNA from it. In November 2012, Cliff Barackman wrote the following report on his blog:

Of most interest to us was the hair sample. The hair sample had been found by a tribal game officer on an animal trail leading from a location where a bigfoot had been recently seen. It was found on some broken branches more than eight feet above the ground, which would seem to rule out that it was buffalo (which are kept nearby), bear, deer, or human hair. Roger had in his possession enough hairs to spare some for us to have tested for DNA material. In hair, all of the viable DNA is found in the medulla, or hollow center shaft of the hair. This is a bit problematic because bigfoot hair tends to have fragmentary medullas, if any is present at all. However, a DNA lab in Oklahoma City called DNA Solutions offered to test the sample to see if any material could be extracted for testing. If nothing else, they could examine the hair and tell us what animals the could eliminate as a possible source for the hairs. Also of value is that they could get the results back to us in about a week.

Dr. Brandt Cassidy of DNA Solutions was unable to extract any DNA material from the hairs. He said that the samples were just too old and had not been stored in the the optimal way to prevent the gradual breaking down of the DNA material. However, he was clear about a few things. While superficially similar to a person’s hair, the hair did not appear to be human in origin. First off the hair shafts had tapered ends which would indicate that the hairs had never been subjected to a hair cut. Another difference that was found was that the medulla width was different than what is commonly found among humans. I was supplied with photographs of his microscopic analysis, and I was interested in the fact that the hairs showed to have a reddish tinge when lit from behind, even though the hair appeared to be black when viewed against other backgrounds. This reddish tinge is another distinct characteristic of bigfoot hair. No other results were obtained by future testing of this hair, though Dr. Cassidy has provided me with some interesting articles about proving unknown species by DNA barcoding.

Some other examples of Bigfoot hair:

Bigfoot hair from Golden Ears Provincial Park, British Columbia.

Bigfoot hair from British Colombia via Randy Brisson.

Read the Cliff Barackman's full field report on his blog at Cliff Barackman.