Finding Bigfoot by Moonlight
- S.R. Laing
- Feb 25
- 3 min read
I started by chasing Sasquatch across the Pacific Northwest in Tableau, and ended up tracking the moon.
I analyzed 4,947 Bigfoot encounters across North America between 1921 and 2021. I wasn’t looking for myth. I was testing environmental variables: cloud cover, visibility, UV index, and fractional moonlight to see whether environmental factors influenced reporting patterns.
The dataset included environmental variables such as cloud cover, precipitation, UV index, visibility, and fractional moonlight. But one crucial field was corrupted: time of day.
Without timestamps, aligning sightings to specific lunar conditions should have been impossible. Lunar visibility shifts hour by hour. A full moon at midnight is not the same as a rising moon at dusk.
That constraint reframed the entire investigation.
If I couldn’t align sightings to clock time, could I reconstruct the lunar day itself?
The answer was yes.
Using the 29.53-day synodic lunar cycle, I reverse-engineered lunar day from illumination percentage. Nested conditional logic allowed me to approximate phase progression and build a lunar calendar model without relying on timestamps.
I couldn’t find time. So I found the moon instead.
Once the model was in place, patterns surfaced quickly.
The brightest and darkest nights produced the fewest reports. Sightings clustered instead in mid-range illumination, under conditions of ambiguity.
On the 4,395th record in the dataset, I found the single sighting that occurred during full illumination. It took place downriver of Telogia Creek in Wakulla County, Florida. Although the moon was full, cloud cover registered at 98%.
Rather than breaking the pattern, it reinforced it.
Even under maximum lunar illumination, visibility was obscured.
The clustering was obvious: reports concentrate under transitional light most often during waning gibbous and first-quarter phases.
Bigfoot sightings don’t peak in darkness and they don’t peak under a full moon either. Instead, they cluster in transitional light.
The next thing that caught my eye was a small time bump in reported sightings that mirror a much larger bump in the early 2000s.
I explored possible media influence. The Patterson - Gimlin film predates the first bump by nearly a decade. Harry and the Hendersons aired after it.
The timing didn’t align neatly.
A broader search led to the Ape Canyon incident - a reported violent encounter between miners and alleged “ape men.” A man named William Halliday, born two years after the infamous tale appeared to have some inside knowledge on the event. In 1983, Halliday - now the director of the Western Speleological Survey released a pamphlet called ‘Ape Cave and the Mount Saint Helens Apes’. Wherein he outed the real assailants as local youth throwing rocks from the canyons above. The sun light was behind them concealing their features, throwing wicked shadows. Thus the origin story of an urban legend was revealed, 60 years later.
Whether media influenced these time bumps remains uncertain. But I do wonder if the uptick in Bigfoot interest itself created a sense of urgency in William to set the record straight?
The existence of Sasquatch as a biological organism remains unproven.
But as a reporting phenomenon shaped by environmental ambiguity, the pattern is measurable:
The brightest and darkest nights produced the fewest sightings.
Reports clustered in mid-range illumination, under conditions of ambiguity.
In 1976, Bigfoot enthusiast Peter Byrne submitted a hair sample to the FBI for analysis. Decades later, when the file was released, the verdict arrived: deer.
The physical evidence dissolved under scrutiny.
My results, fortunately, did not require a lab. Just illumination percentages and a stubborn dataset. The FBI tested hair and found deer. I tested moonlight and found ambiguity.
One dissolved under a microscope. The other held under a query.
Perhaps that’s fitting.
Myth, like the creature itself, survives in half-light.
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