Jeff Meldrum—the Idaho State University primatologist who spent decades as the most credentialed scientific advocate for the biological reality of Bigfoot—died on September 10, 2025. His book Sasquatch: Legend Meets Science remains the most rigorous attempt to apply formal anatomical analysis to the footprint evidence, and his death removes from the field its most prominent figure who held both mainstream academic credentials and genuine conviction that an undiscovered North American primate exists. Queen’s University Library commemorated his passing by declaring October 2025 “Cryptozoology Month,” which tells you something about how the field occupies a peculiar zone between legitimate inquiry and cultural curiosity.

Meanwhile, in the Scottish Highlands, the Loch Ness Centre launched the World Federation of Legendary Monsters in 2025—a formal alliance between cryptid research organizations across multiple countries, sharing sonar readings, thermal imaging data, DNA samples, and underwater footage. Their next coordinated search is scheduled for May 22–25, 2026. And Professor Neil Gemmell’s Loch Ness environmental DNA study—the most methodologically rigorous scientific investigation ever conducted at the loch—still has not published its full technical paper, years after the preliminary results were announced.

This is the state of cryptozoology in 2026: the field’s most serious scientist is dead, its most famous investigation remains incomplete, and its practitioners are simultaneously forming international federations and selling Bigfoot Valentine’s Day shirts. The question of what science actually says about cryptids requires separating the methodology—which is sometimes genuinely interesting—from the conclusions, which are consistently disappointing for anyone hoping monsters are real.

The eDNA revolution (and what it found)

Environmental DNA analysis has transformed the scientific investigation of aquatic cryptids from speculation into testable hypothesis. The principle is straightforward: every organism in a body of water sheds DNA—skin cells, feces, mucus, decomposing tissue—and that DNA can be collected from water samples, sequenced, and matched against known species databases. If a large unknown animal lives in a lake, its DNA should be in the water. If it’s not in the water, the animal almost certainly isn’t in the lake.

Gemmell’s team from the University of Otago collected 250 water samples from various depths and locations throughout Loch Ness in 2019. The preliminary results, widely reported at the time, found no evidence of plesiosaur DNA, no evidence of large fish DNA (ruling out the sturgeon hypothesis), no evidence of any large unknown animal. What the study did find was a significant quantity of European eel DNA—more than expected—which led to the widely circulated but somewhat misleading headline that “Nessie might be a giant eel.”

The nuance, as zoologist Darren Naish has clarified, is that the study didn’t demonstrate that a giant eel exists. What it demonstrated is that virtually all competing hypotheses for the Loch Ness Monster can be excluded by the eDNA evidence, and the eel hypothesis is the only one that isn’t directly contradicted by the data. That’s a very different claim. The eels in Loch Ness are almost certainly normal-sized European eels doing normal eel things. The study’s actual contribution is negative rather than positive: it tells us what Nessie isn’t, which is everything anyone has ever proposed it might be.

The eDNA approach has been applied more broadly, and the results follow the same pattern. Water sampling in lakes with reported monster sightings consistently identifies known species—pike, trout, char, eels—and consistently fails to identify anything unknown. Camera traps deployed in forests with frequent Bigfoot reports consistently photograph bears, deer, elk, coyotes, and occasionally hikers—but never an unidentified primate. The tools that modern biology uses to detect rare and elusive species are extraordinarily sensitive. They can identify a species from a single skin cell in a liter of lake water. They can photograph a snow leopard in the Himalayas or a Sumatran rhino in Borneo. They have never, in any controlled scientific deployment, detected a cryptid.

The Bigfoot evidence problem

The case for Bigfoot rests on four categories of evidence: eyewitness reports, footprint casts, the 1967 Patterson-Gimlin film, and more recently, eDNA sampling and acoustic analysis.

Eyewitness reports number in the thousands. The Bigfoot Field Researchers Organization, the largest and oldest Sasquatch investigation organization, maintains a database of sighting reports across North America. The problem with eyewitness evidence—as every forensic scientist and cognitive psychologist will tell you—is that human perception and memory are unreliable, particularly under conditions of surprise, poor visibility, and emotional arousal, which are precisely the conditions that characterize most Bigfoot sightings. The statistical work of Floe Foxon, who applies mathematical analysis to cryptid sighting data, has shown that reported sighting patterns correlate more strongly with human population density and recreational land use than with any plausible distribution of an undiscovered species. You see more Bigfoot where more people go hiking, which is what you’d expect if sightings are driven by misidentification rather than actual encounters.

Footprint casts are more interesting. Meldrum analyzed thousands of tracks and identified anatomical features—a mid-tarsal break in the foot structure, dermal ridges, consistent proportions—that he argued would be extraordinarily difficult to hoax at scale across disparate locations and decades. The counterargument is that a template-based hoax doesn’t require every individual cast to be independently fabricated, and that the “anatomical consistency” Meldrum identified could reflect the influence of earlier, well-publicized casts on subsequent hoaxers. This argument is inherently unresolvable without a specimen.

The Patterson-Gimlin film, shot in 1967 in northern California, remains the most analyzed piece of footage in cryptozoology. It shows a large, bipedal, hair-covered figure walking away from the camera. In nearly sixty years, neither conclusive debunking nor conclusive authentication has been achieved. The figure’s gait, muscle movement, and proportions have been argued by various analysts to be either impossible to replicate in a costume or entirely consistent with a person in a suit, depending on which analyst you ask and which assumptions they bring.

The FBI analyzed hair and tissue samples attributed to Bigfoot across multiple submissions. Every sample was identified as belonging to a known species—deer, bear, elk, cow, synthetic materials, and in one memorable case, human. The results were declassified and published. Not a single sample was unidentifiable.

What cryptozoology gets right (accidentally)

The most honest defense of cryptozoological inquiry isn’t that cryptids are real. It’s that the history of zoology is full of animals that were dismissed as legends before they were confirmed as species. The coelacanth—a fish from the age of dinosaurs, thought extinct for 66 million years—was caught off the coast of South Africa in 1938. The mountain gorilla was considered a myth by Western science until 1902. The okapi, the giant squid, the Komodo dragon, the platypus—all were regarded as fantastical before specimens were obtained.

The difference, and it’s a critical one, is that every one of those species was confirmed through physical evidence—a body, a specimen, bones, DNA from a real animal. The confirmation came from the standard tools of biology applied in the standard way. No species has ever been confirmed through footprint casts, eyewitness reports, or grainy film alone. The tools that discovered the coelacanth are the same tools that have been deployed extensively in Bigfoot and Nessie territory and have found nothing.

What cryptozoology does contribute to science—unintentionally, and often to the annoyance of its practitioners—is ecological survey data. The Loch Ness eDNA study produced a comprehensive catalog of species diversity in one of Scotland’s most iconic bodies of water. Camera trap deployments in the Pacific Northwest generate wildlife population data. Acoustic monitoring in alleged Bigfoot habitats produces recordings of documented species. The search for monsters, when conducted with scientific methodology, generates useful data about everything except monsters.

The cultural question that matters more

The more interesting question than “is Bigfoot real?” is “why does every culture on earth produce stories about large, elusive, humanoid creatures living just beyond the boundary of settled land?” The Sasquatch, the Yeti, the Yowie, the Yeren, the Almas, the Orang Pendek—the pattern is global and ancient. These aren’t independent inventions of the same hoax. They’re independent expressions of something deeply embedded in how human beings relate to wilderness, darkness, and the limits of knowledge.

The statistical reality is stark. There is no confirmed physical evidence—no body, no bones, no verified DNA, no specimen—for any large unknown primate species in North America, despite the continent being one of the most extensively surveyed landmasses on Earth, with millions of trail cameras, satellite coverage, and a recreational hiking population that puts human eyes on virtually every square kilometer of forest on a regular basis. If a breeding population of eight-foot-tall primates existed in the Pacific Northwest, the absence of a specimen after 60 years of active searching is extraordinarily difficult to explain.

But the legend persists. The BFRO database continues to receive new reports. The World Federation of Legendary Monsters continues to organize searches. People continue to see things they can’t explain in the woods and on the water, and some percentage of those people will continue to interpret those experiences as encounters with undiscovered species rather than as misidentifications, pareidolia, or the natural human tendency to find patterns in ambiguous stimuli.

Cryptozoology in 2026 is a field where the tools have never been better and the evidence has never been thinner. The eDNA sampling, the camera traps, the acoustic analysis, the AI-powered pattern recognition—all of these technologies are capable of detecting cryptids if cryptids exist. They have detected everything else. The absence of positive results, after decades of increasingly sophisticated searching, is itself a finding. It’s just not the finding anyone in the field wanted.

We cover the epistemology of anomalous claims—including cryptids, Fortean phenomena, and the institutions that investigate them—across our Fortean Phenomena course. If the question of why the absence of evidence isn’t treated as evidence of absence by the people doing the searching is more interesting to you than another blurry photograph, the course is built for exactly that tension.