Bigfoot BBQ and Bigfoot Festival
Estes Park, CO
April 24 and 25, 2026
I always love this get-together. I don’t expect to hear compelling new evidence about Bigfoot, but the camaraderie and atmosphere is wonderful. There’s no better place to study the world’s most complicated primates, Homo sapiens.
This year we had Doctor Mireya Mayor and two of her colleagues from Expedition Bigfoot (Bryce Johnson and Biko Wright) as celebrity guests, along with comedy duo Bigfoot & Jeff. I normally only watch EB when there’s an interesting guest or some unusually intriguing claim about evidence, as it gets a little slow watching people squinting at thermal images or reacting to noises in the dark. However, as a science writer interested in zoology and cryptozoology, I didn't want to miss the chance to talk to Mayor. She's taken considerable flak for being one of the few degreed scientists who spend time on the topic. Scientist or entertainer? By her account, she is a scientist who knows how to make good TV and enjoys doing it. (By the way, there are no plans she knows of to do more EB episodes.)
In person, Mayor comes off as sincere. I’ve no special ability to detect when people are misleading me, but we talked several times, and I didn’t pick up any BS. Similar to Finding Bigfoot biologist Ranae Holland two years ago at this gathering, she didn't convince me Bigfoot existed but did convince me she believes there is a real phenomenon worthy of scientific exploration.
The annual Bigfoot BBQ, which is a bit pricey but always tasty (loved the dessert, folks) was the night of April 24th. I sat at a table of people from the sponsoring wireless company and said hi to numerous people, including the Apache family at the next table, I recalled from earlier visits. Everyone seemed to be enjoying themselves. I spent some time chatting with The Cryptid Crew podcast team, giving them a copy of Of Books and Beasts: A Cryptozoologist’s Library and receiving a cool keychain and a promise of future discussions about being a guest.
The celebrity guests (including Bigfoot) introduced themselves, then went to the good part: Q and A.
I should mention we were asked not to record for copyright reasons, though photos were encouraged, so this post is based on my recollections and the notes I took. Most of the questions, not surprisingly, went to Mayor. For what it’s worth, she answered everything, never refusing or deflecting a question. I didn’t get to ask all the follow-up questions that came to mind: Mayor was generous to me with her time, but there were always other people awaiting their turns.
I asked her at the banquet how, given that she has done field investigations of primates that took her into the forest or jungle for months, she balanced that established methodology with the needs of a TV show. [I have appeared on cryptozoology-related TV twice, so I know some basics, but have never been on an extended expedition.] She said that she has been out in the bush for 10 months out of a year, and she’d love to do that with Bigfoot. However, the TV show’s schedule and funding allow only four weeks at a time in the field. She noted this was considerably longer than other shows of this sort [Forrest Galante's Extinct or Alive? spends two weeks looking for an animal, Finding Bigfoot much less], and they have returned to the same location to follow up. They have been to a spot in Kentucky twice and Washington state several times. So, she feels they are getting as close as circumstances allow to the methods she’s used studying chimps, gorillas, South American monkeys, and lemurs. She’d become used to doing field work with a camera present for Nat Geo and other sponsors: despite initially turning down EB, she felt comfortable with the program once convinced the subject was worthwhile.
I asked all the guests whether the new documentary had changed th
eir minds about the Patterson-Gimlin film. Mayor stated she had not seen Chasing Bigfoot and would wait until she saw it to judge the results. She added, smiling, that her show was charged $65,000 every time they shared a clip from the film and wondered whether they were due a refund. She did say she knew Bob Gimlin well and he stood by his story. Johnson and Wright said essentially the same things.
One questioner asked the panelists about the weirdest event they remembered. Wright described a brief sighting that looked like a big biped, after which they found a few footprints. I can’t recall Johnson’s answer. Mayor described the episode in Kentucky where the initial findings for eDNA came back with many similarities to chimpanzee DNA, and she was unable to find any stories of escaped or released chimpanzees in the area. (This story got stranger the next day: keep reading.)
I felt sorry for her when the next question was asked. A woman said, “My husband is infatuated with you,” and they both wanted to know how she stays looking good in the field. After only a moment for an embarrassed grin and “Oh, my,” Mayor replied smoothly that she had always been a “girly girl” who did indeed take lipstick and mascara into the field and try to keep her hair in decent shape. She does not have an assistant or a beautician, just tricks picked up over the years. She mentioned her time long ago as a cheerleader with the Miami Dolphins, noting that the team had had some bad years in her absence. [As a Dolphins fan, that’s putting it mildly: maybe she took all their good luck with her.]
An interesting response to another question: Mayor said her team does not try to be as silent and otherwise unnoticeable in the woods as hunters do. They believe they are pursuing a curious primate which may come in closer to look at intruders. She mentioned, without going into detail, that she had seen non-zoological phenomena like orbs, and didn’t know what to think of them, but honesty required not simply dismissing the topic. (Holland said basically the same thing at this event a couple of years ago.)
Saturday included the festival at the park, which despite some threat of rain had more people and more vendors than I’d noticed on my last visit. The local band in the afternoon was good. Major guests did separate presentations at the Park Theater as well as staffing booths where they answered questions and sold photos.
In Mayor’s presentation “Science and Bigfoot,” she provided some interesting information on the show. When she was first contacted, during an expedition to Madagascar, she said no. She knew little about Bigfoot and thought other scientists would no longer take her seriously if she did the show. When asked again, she asked the late Jane Goodall for advice. Goodall, she said, responded, “Who gives a s--- what other people think?” and encouraged her to do it.
Producers told her “they were serious about doing science” and wanted her to be on the show to do the science properly. The way the show is edited and broadcast will not make anyone think of a BBC Wildlife documentary, but she maintained that everything shown happened. There was some practical joking between shooting, but no events were invented for the cameras. I will note in her favor that it would have been easier to look “scientific” if she’d avoided talking about orbs or a puzzling event (the questioner pinned this down as Season 2 Episode 11) where a shape appeared to be a shadow and then a thermal image without ever being captured as a solid object.
Mayor said she approached the quest the way she had for other filmed expeditions where she was looking for rare primates that didn’t have recent photographs or specimens. Of course she mentioned that one such trip had netted a new species, the pygmy mouse lemur, whose impossibly adorable photo kept popping up on screen when her presentation glitched.
She opened the presentation with the question, “What if we are not alone?” She mentioned other animals that had been overlooked by science, giving commonly cited examples including the gorilla, giant squid, etc. Granting that she is a primatologist, she made one mistake here, mentioning seeing squid “light shows,” which indicates she conflated the giant and Humboldt squid.
[Suggestion to Mayor and other crypto presenters: go with more recent examples of discoveries! From 1976 on, the megamouth shark, saola (aka the Vu Quang ox), two or more species of muntjac deer, a tree kangaroo, and several beaked whales are among the sizable animals available, and that’s sticking to wholly new animals without going into taxonomic recognition of previsouly known populations like Rice’s and Omura’s whales and the Tapanuli orangutan (Pongo tapanuliensis).]
Dr. Mayor never said she believed Bigfoot existed, but that the question was about evidence and not belief. She said that some scientists can be “closed-minded” about particular topics, still a relatively mild statement compared to the denouncing by some cryptozoologists. She was surprised to learn how interested Goodall was in the topic and that she’d followed information about Bigfoot and similar creatures from around the world. Goodall, in a clip from EB, suggested the animal was smart enough to be scared of humans and hide bodies, a controversial idea even among cryptozoologists. Mayor said the PG film was not definitive evidence but could not be casually dismissed. She ran a clip from the show of an analyst talking about the film and added that she thought there was still analysis to be done on it.
Mayor said her most intriguing Bigfoot discovery in the field was three apparent primate nests of different sizes close together. She emphasized that these were not just areas where the plants were crushed down, but true nests carefully arranged for comfort. She was certain they had been made by a creature with hands.
On DNA evidence, she said it was frustrating that all the evidence so far was either inconclusive or contaminated. She made the interesting statement, one I’ve not heard before, that many researchers are selfish about keeping their results and their DNA samples to themselves. This makes it difficult to compare “unidentified” samples between researchers to see if they have any consistency with each other. She talked about looking over footprints with the late Jeff Meldrum and being impressed with his idea of a flexible midfoot.
Returning to the Kentucky chimpanzee problem, she described how the evidence was originally sequenced by UCLA’s environmental DNA lab. The scientist Mayor talked to there was initially extremely curious, but when Mayor called her with follow-up questions, she said her boss had told her to stop talking about the subject to protect the reputation of the program. I asked Mayor if she’d ruled out any practical jokes or planted evidence by her costars or crew. She insisted there was no chance of that, and the support team did not know where they were going and could not have planted something in advance. She maintains it’s a mystery to her how that DNA got there.
Mayor posted a map showing sightings in all 50 states. I asked her if such a range was possible and what she thought the range of a possible Bigfoot species actually was. She felt that it was quite possible for a primate species to spread itself over the continent, using the example of Indigenous humans. [I’m not sure how valid that comparison is, since early Americans eventually numbered in the millions and left all kinds of evidence of their passing, not to mention they survived despite genocidal persecution and are still here.] She noted the strong match to black bear ranges and the possibility of bears being mistaken for Bigfoot. This also, she said, showed a match to areas where the environment could support a large omnivorous mammal. In response to a question about diet, she said others had reported Bigfoot hunting animals, but she’d seen evidence only of plant-eating.
On other kinds of evidence, Mayor initially dismissed “tree structures” but, over time, thought she saw repeated patterns in them. To her, it appears some are made with considerable effort by a large creature with hands. She was asked about the reported phenomenon of upside-down trees—that is, trees which appear to have actually been pulled from the soil and replanted upside down. She said she did not know the origin, but she had seen such trees in Alaska in a place where it seemed impossible for loggers with the needed equipment to play a joke. [Why a hypothetical Bigfoot would do this is another question.]
Mayor was also asked about people who claim to have exchanged gifts with Bigfoot. She said she had not experienced that but thought it was reasonable given known ape behavior.
She was also asked about “high strangeness,” a touchy topic for any scientist and one those of us who confine cryptozoology to physical animals would rather did not come up. She stated she had seen apparent lights or orbs on thermal imaging, but when she turned a flashlight on the same spot, there was nothing visible. I have no expertise in the subject of thermal imagers and cannot comment on whether this might indicate equipment problems or anomalies. Ranae Holland attributed one such incident to reflections from owls’ eyes. Mayor simply said it was unexplained.
Mayor never said anything like, “Bigfoot is real.” Rather, she concluded there is some phenomenon in North American woods which is currently “not accounted for.”
So, what do I think? I did not come away any more convinced of the existence of Bigfoot. I can't get past the absence of a fossil record, bones, or other hard evidence, no matter how sincere some witnesses are. I did come away believing that Mayor is being genuine. I talked to her coworkers only very briefly and cannot offer a viewpoint on them. I was more impressed by Mayor in person that than by the version filtered through Facebook threads and publications, and for that matter through the filter of her own TV show’s editing. She was adamant that every word and reaction we see from her on TV, even in the controversial first season, was sincere. We discussed my Lake Iliamna writing including Apex Predator project (she was curious about the cryptid mystery there and was encouraging), she accepted a copy of Of Books and Beasts, and we promised to talk again in the future.
So that’s the Bigfoot Festival for 2026. I had interesting conversations and learned a lot as usual. I limited my purchases, which have sometimes gone overboard, to Bigfoot socks and the calendar from the EB booth, which I may hang in my office if I decide move Ranae Holland’s 2026 Bigfoot calendar. I hope to be back next year!
