The FBI has an official file on Bigfoot
In 1976, a Bigfoot researcher named Peter Byrne mailed the FBI 15 hairs and a small piece of skin, formally requesting the Bureau’s own crime laboratory analyze them for a species identification. The FBI’s Scientific and Technical Services Division agreed. They ran the test. They wrote back on official letterhead. The result was not exotic. The delight of this file has nothing to do with the verdict and everything to do with the fact that a federal law enforcement laboratory agreed to run the test at all, then catalogued and preserved the correspondence for over four decades.
// Field Guide
Get Surviving the Simulation: $8
Ten rules and daily protocols for treating reality as a system you can read, for anyone who finds it stranger that the FBI ran the test than what the test found.
Get the guide: $8 instant download →Peter Byrne ran the Bigfoot Information Center in The Dalles, Oregon, and had spent years collecting field evidence. In 1976, he wrote directly to the FBI requesting a forensic hair and skin analysis, reasoning that if a genuine unclassified species were involved, the Bureau’s own scientific division was the most credible lab available to confirm it. The correspondence that follows, released in full through a 2019 FOIA request, shows the FBI treating the request as a routine, answerable scientific question rather than dismissing it outright.
The FBI’s Scientific and Technical Services Division examined the submitted hairs and skin sample using standard forensic hair comparison methodology. Their conclusion, delivered on official FBI letterhead: the hairs were of deer family origin, not primate, and not an unidentified species. The file documents a real chain of custody, a real internal case designation, and real signed correspondence between Byrne and named FBI personnel.
This establishes that the FBI, as an institution, treated a Bigfoot hair sample as a legitimate forensic question worth its laboratory’s time in 1976, generated real internal paperwork processing that request, and preserved the full record for public release decades later. The file is genuine, declassified, and hosted on the FBI’s own Vault archive.
What this does not establish is evidence for an undiscovered species. The FBI’s own conclusion was mundane: deer hair. The file is interesting specifically because of the institutional willingness to test the claim on its merits, not because of what the test revealed.
Document: FBI file on hair and tissue analysis submitted by Peter Byrne, Bigfoot Information Center. 1976-1977. 22 pages.
Declassified: Released via FOIA, 2019.
You just read one document. Pro shows you every document that contradicts it.
The Contradiction Engine cross-references any two records in the archive and shows you where the government’s own story changed. The Evidence Chain View maps how one program became the next, sourced at every step. Citations generated correctly, every time. Your own notes, saved against the document.
Start your free month →This site costs real money to run. If it’s useful to you, you can help keep it going →