By Andy Rose, CNN
(CNN) — Mike Miller and Benjamin Radford have both spent years talking about Bigfoot – from very different points of view.
“When you hear something or you see something, you know, that sticks with you and becomes part of you, and you just can’t shake it,” says Miller, who’s been on the hunt for the yeti for nearly two decades with the Ohio Night Stalkers.
“It’s a fascinating question, whether or not these creatures exist,” allows Radford, a folklorist and deputy editor of Skeptical Inquirer magazine.
But that’s about all Miller and Radford agree on when it comes to the existence of an unidentified species of hairy giants.
For Miller – the hunter – finding Sasquatch is a mystery whose answer could be around any corner or in any cave.
For Radford – the skeptic – it’s a source of constant disappointment.
“If they’re real, they live and breathe and poop and eat and sleep and drop dead, and we should be able to find one,” Radford says. “How are they being elusive? There would have to be thousands of them.”
The long-running debate got a new spark in March.
A big uptick in reports – known by Bigfoot aficionados as a “flap” – was catalogued around Portage County, Ohio, just east of Akron, with unidentified figures averaging 8 feet tall in wooded areas along the Mahoning River.
“And it stopped just as quickly as it started,” says Jeremiah Byron, host of the Bigfoot Society Podcast, which collected and mapped the reports and has posited a dramatic change in weather conditions from winter to spring may have put a Bigfoot herd on the move.
The sudden surge of claimed sightings – call it the Ohio Flap of 2026 – reignited a debate that’s been going on in North America for upwards of a century. Does a breed resembling hulking apes – hominoids, if you want to be technical – live among us?
On one point, both believers and non-believers seem to agree:
It’s a helluva lot of fun to talk about.
“It’s such a weird world,” Byron smiles.
The Bigfoot mystery and its investigations span decades
The folklore about mysterious and elusive creatures in North America, experts say, became more mainstream with a 1960 article in True magazine, describing a tall, hairy figure that looked “partly human and partly animal.”
What started as pure storytelling evolved into more organized searching for answers, using newer technology.
The question of true or false became a sensation in 1967 with the famous film shot by Roger Patterson and Bob Gimlin in the Pacific Northwest, capturing a hairy figure ambling through a Northern California wood. Decades of debate have followed on whether the film was a hoax.
The mystery even got the attention of the FBI, which agreed in 1976 to examine 15 hair samples taken from a reported Bigfoot encounter in Oregon. This “is a serious question that needs answering,” reads a letter from the director of the Bigfoot Information Center and Exhibition.
After putting the samples under a microscope, the FBI provided its answer: “It was concluded as a result of these examinations that the hairs are of deer family origin.”
But the demand for answers to time-worn mysteries only increased, as the weekly TV series “In Search Of…” hosted by Leonard Nimoy included several Bigfoot stories in its chronicle of the strange. (Both Byron and Radford cite the show as helping to inspire their interest in unexplained phenomena.)
Now, the search for ’Squatch is also a source of humor and even marketing, wit