Analysis of Hair find in Oklahoma The weekend of November 16/17/18th 2007, the TexLa Research group was invited by a contact in Oklahoma to come and check out an area where Sasquatch sightings are ongoing. On the morning of November 17th, the group was conducting field research in the area when we discovered an 8ft Eastern Red Cedar that was showing fresh limb damage. We have found Cedars with this type of damage in other areas we are researching, so much so that damage to Cedars is something that we look for now whenever we are in the field. Close inspection of the tree (see photos 1 and 2) revealed that hair was entwined in the limbs and caught in some of the breaks. Hair length varied anywhere from 1 1/2in to more than 7in. We started checking for tapered ends and found that some hairs, especially those that were less than 3in, did have ends worn to a tapered point. This is something that is looked for to determine if the hair could be human in origin as most humans will have a cut end to the hair. Hair was pulled from varying heights ranging from ground level to above 4ft. The hair was all the same color that being a dark brown to black appearance. On the ground we found 5 cockle burrs (see photo 4) that were full of the same hair, and an area where cockle burrs were growing was found within 60 yards of this tree in a NW direction.
Samples of the hair were sent to four different labs for analysis, with our initial objective and expectation being to determine if the hair might be from domesticated animals such as cattle, horse, dog, etc. If it turned out to not be any of these then we expected the hair to perhaps be Black Bear in origin even though our witness from this area was adament that there have been no Bear sightings coming out of this area. Black Bear are established in Oklahoma but this area is about 120 miles west of the currently accepted range for the species in Oklahoma.
The samples were either sent or delivered in person to Dr. Henner Fahrenbach, Dr. Lynn Rogers and staff at the Wildlife Research Institute(WRI) in Minnesota, the Sam Noble Museum of Natural History in Norman, Ok. and a fourth lab was employed to attempt to pull DNA sequences from any skin tags that might be attached to the samples. The name of this lab will be withheld due to the person doing the testing being an aquaintence of the researchers and the fact that they were doing the testing free of charge, thus the testing did not have the normal statement of authenticity nor official report attached to the results. The results, depending on what they were, would strictly be used to justify whether further analysis should be pursued on the sample.
Dr. Fahrenbach responded with his results first and claimed that without a doubt the sample was Black Bear. We found this interesting and would be a significant find if we could confirm it, so we sent a sample to Dr. Lynn Rogers to have Dr. Fahrenbach's indentification confirmed. Things got more interesting when WRI responded:
"The hair you sent is not black bear hair -- I know that much. I have included a sample of black bear hair for comparison. I really don't have a clue what it could be. I suggested bovine tail hair because of the length -- but I haven't a sample of bovine tail hair to compare it with. The hair you sent is pretty fine stuff -- and long. I can't think of a wild animal with hair that long."
Next to respond was the Sam Noble Museum Department of Mammology, they reported:
"We don't feel confident in properly identifying it, but we know that it is not a bison, or bear (although I really wanted it to be bear hair, how exciting)."
Again it was found that the most likely culprit, Black Bear, was also not found to be a match as we had originally expected.
Finally, in another attempt to find out what exactly we had we engaged our contact that had access to a testing facility to try and pull a DNA sequence if possible from skin tags still attached to the hairs. In this case whatever sequence was extracted (if any) would be compared to the entire library of known samples held in the computer system in this lab. This would include domestic animals as well as most wild animals indigenous to this region. After several days of testing we received an email from the technician which read in part -
"Yeah, 3 of the skin tags retrieved from the samples did not match or "NO MATCH FOUND" according to computer analysis. Weird, huh? As far as I can tell, I can't match the sequencing codes exactly to any animal/human. This can be due to a number of reasons, however, the skin tags appeared in really good shape. I'm not officially allowed to say that they belong to a squatch but another explanation is highly unprobable given the location, time of year, and the appearance (size, shape, color, thickness, etc.)."
When queried that it was not even a match to Black Bear our contact responded with the following:
"Actually black bear is the first thing that was ruled out. Microscopically, the hairs do have a consistency that is similar to bear, but they are genetically different. I know, I was surprised too. I'm baffled but as I've learned through years of lab work you can not argue with science."
The photos at the bottom right of this page show how the different types of hair compare from a small sample of animals that potentially could be the source for our sample. For those of you who are serious Sasquatch researchers you will know that one of the things that is currently believed to be diagnostic to Sasquatch hair is the lack of a medulla. Researchers also know that without a body it can't be known if all Sasquatch hair lacks a medulla or if only hair from certain parts of the body will lack a medulla such is the case with humans. The hair that we found does contain a medulla but if you are still reading this you will know that we have made a rather serious effort to identify the owner and this has failed to date. If you work for a lab that would like to take a stab at identifying the hair, feel free to contact us as we do have a large sample to work with.
Update: We attended the Honobia Bigfoot Festival on the weekend of Oct. 3,4,5 where one of the speakers was Dr. Jeff Meldrum. We explained the issue we were having with getting the hair identified and gave him a sample of around a dozen hairs and are standing by for his findings. We will update this page when we have his results. A photo of the cross section of the hair found in Oklahoma, compare this to the Black Bear hair to the right.
The tree, the visible damage is from middle to left side of this picture.
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This was a very large sample, we found 5 burrs in all that were loaded with hair.
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A photo of the cross section of the hair found in Oklahoma, compare this to the Black Bear hair to the right. |  |
A pair of probable Sasquatch hair, lacking Medulla | Click to set custom HTML
Photo of the hair root on the same hair as to the left. |
