Major DNA Studies Probe Bigfoot and Sasquatch Genetic Evidence

There's a video making the rounds on YouTube right now from the channel NEXORA Space that dives deep into something researchers have been chasing for decades — actual DNA evidence tied to Bigfoot sightings. And honestly, it's one of those pieces that makes you stop scrolling and pay attention. The video walks through the long history of how people have tried to prove the existence of Sasquatch, starting with the oral traditions of Indigenous nations across the Pacific Northwest. The Salish people, along with dozens of other tribes, didn't describe these beings as spirits or gods — they described them as physical creatures sharing the forest. That framing has always mattered, because it positions Sasquatch as a question of natural history rather than folklore. From there, the video moves into the modern era — the 1958 Bluff Creek footprints, the Patterson-Gimlin film from 1967, and the steady accumulation of sighting reports that never quite went away no matter how much mainstream science tried to dismiss them. The Bigfoot Field Researchers Organization's database, with over 5,000 documented encounters since 1995 and Washington state alone holding 724 verified reports, is a good reminder that this isn't just campfire talk. These are reports from hunters, forestry workers, and wildlife biologists who know their stuff. But the real meat of the video is the DNA research. It covers Melba Ketchum's controversial 2013 study, where her lab analyzed samples from over 100 locations across North America. Roughly a third of those samples showed something bizarre — mitochondrial DNA that was unambiguously human, paired with nuclear DNA that didn't match any known primate. That kind of mito-nuclear discordance is exactly the kind of thing that makes geneticists raise their eyebrows. Ketchum's interpretation was a hybrid hominin species, something that arose around 15,000 years ago. The scientific community largely rejected the paper because she published it in a journal she created herself, but the data itself never really got a fair hearing. Then there's the Bryan Sykes study from 2014, published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B — a legitimate, peer-reviewed journal. Sykes' team analyzed 36 hair samples from museums, scientists, and Bigfoot researchers across the U.S., Bhutan, India, and Russia. Most came back as ordinary animals, which the media used to declare the whole thing debunked. But two samples — one from the Indian Himalayas and one from a bamboo forest in Bhutan — matched DNA from a 40,000-year-old polar bear fossil from the Pleistocene. Sykes himself said on the record that it could be a new species or a hybrid, and called for an expedition to follow up. That part is worth sitting with. An Oxford genetics professor, publishing in one of the most respected biology journals in the world, saying the DNA evidence suggested an unknown or hybrid bear species might be behind some of the Yeti reports. The mainstream headlines skipped right past that detail. The video does a solid job of laying out why DNA science is the one thing that could actually move this debate forward — not eyewitness accounts, not footprint casts, not blurry footage, but hard genetic data. It's worth watching all the way through because the final piece of what the DNA revealed is where things get really interesting. Anyone who's been following this topic for a while knows the Ketchum study and the Sykes study are usually talked about separately. Seeing them placed side by side, with the context of how each was received by the scientific community, gives a clearer picture of where the evidence actually stands — and where the gaps still are. If you've got an hour or so, this one's worth the time. The channel NEXORA Space put together a thoughtful breakdown that doesn't talk down to anyone on either side of the debate, and it treats the subject with the seriousness it deserves.