Creatures, Myths & Legends

The Bigfoot Files: FBI publishes cryptid case file on its website

By T.K. Randall
November 27, 2025 ·  24 comments

Image: AI-generated (Bing AI / Dall-E 3) It turns out that Bigfoot isn't just some fringe phenomenon - the Federal Bureau of Investigation itself once thought it significant enough to maintain its own case file on the subject.

Now available to view on the FBI's own website, the 'Bigfoot Files' are essentially a 22-page release containing correspondences, newspaper clippings and other information on the phenomenon.

One letter, which was sent in 1976 from Peter Byrne of the Bigfoot Information Center to the assistant director of the FBI Jay Cochran Jr., asks for testing to be carried out on a Bigfoot hair sample.

Another letter sent a few months later followed up on this examination by noting that the FBI lab had reportedly concluded that the hairs were from a species of deer.In total, the release contains multiple such letters representing a chain of ongoing correspondence.

Ultimately, the case file doesn't really offer any further evidence to support the existence of Bigfoot, but what it does do is suggest that the FBI took the subject seriously - at least in the 1970s.

After all - it seems unlikely to the extreme that the assistant director of the FBI would go along with a request to test alleged Bigfoot hair samples in this day and age.

You can read the full release for yourself in the FBI's vault - here.

Source: FBI.gov | Comments (24)

Tags: FBI, Bigfoot