Bigfoot is a bear but Loch Ness is not a giant eel, says data scientist using maths to explain legends

A view of the Loch Ness Monster, near Inverness, Scotland in 1934. It was later exposed as a hoax by one of the participants, Chris Spurling, who, on his deathbed, revealed that it was staged. Photo / Getty Images

In the field of cryptozoology — the study of animals which have not yet been proven to exist — there are no bigger questions than what is Bigfoot and the Loch Ness monster.

Now, a scientist has used statistics to try and explain the legends of two of the world’s most high-profile urban myths.

Bigfoot and Nessie, two behemoths of 20th century culture, have been the subject of press attention for 90 years and are still making headlines as people try and conclude, once and for all, whether they are fact or fiction.

Modern studies have found no convincing evidence that Loch Ness is the habitat of a giant prehistoric marine reptile or that there is an as-yet-unrecognised species of giant bipedal ape roaming around the US Pacific Northwest.

Floe Foxen, a US-based data scientist, has used cold, hard numbers to try and tackle the mysteries.

The self-described “epistemic trespasser” has a day job as a professional data scientist and repurposed the number-crunching methods of his work to Nessie and Bigfoot.

Alleged photo of Bigfoot: Former rodeo rider Roger Patterson said it showed an American version of the Abominable Snowman. Photo / File

He found that, statistically speaking, the current theory that Bigfoot sightings are actually misidentified black bears is “very likely”.

However, he says the current theory that Nessie is actually a giant eel is “vanishingly unlikely”.

“Last year, I took my partner, Dr Arielle Selya, who is also a scientist, on an X-Files-themed road trip around the UK, as a treat,” Foxon told the Telegraph.

“We went on a ghost tour in Edinburgh, and visited Stonehenge, Whitby Abbey, and Loch Ness. Neither of us are ‘believers’; we’re sceptics, so it was just for fun.”

He does not believe himself in either Bigfoot or Nessie, saying the likelihood of finding a Mesozoic reptile or an Early Pleistocene hominid alive today is “vanishingly unlikely”.

However, scientists need to be open-minded, he said, adding it “would be arrogant to say there is no chance” they exist.

The trip got the analytical juices flowing and set him on a new side project, seeing if numbers could shed light on the world’s two foremost cases of cryptozoology.

“Most scientists are very dismissive, but a few have taken things slightly more seriously,” he said.

“Like the suggestion that there may not be a plesiosaur in Loch Ness and that there may be large eels which are occasionally mistaken for lake monsters splashing about on the surface.

“Usually when people say they’ve seen something like Bigfoot they aren’t lying about what they think they saw, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t mistaken.”

In two pre-prints, one dedicated to each beast, Foxon looked at existing data on bear sightings and eel catches to estimate how many of each animal you would need, statistically speaking, in order to get one of sufficient size to be confused with a 10ft-tall bipedal ape or a Mesozoic leviathan.

“On the average, for every 900 bears in a given state or province, you’d expect to record one Bigfoot ‘sighting’,” he told the Telegraph.

“The most likely explanation is therefore that many Bigfoot sightings are really sightings of the black bear, which makes sense because bears do occasionally walk bipedally with their hind legs, so they can look a bit like giant apes. The bear explanation for Bigfoot is very likely.”

However, while there are enough black bears in the US and Canada of sufficient size to convince the laws of probability that Bigfoot is simply a bear, the same can not be said for Scottish eels.

In 2019, Professor Neil Gemmell, a geneticist from the University of Otago in New Zealand, trawled Loch Ness for DNA and found no evidence of plesiosaur genetic material. There were also no signs of sturgeon, catfish or Greenland sharks, other creatures previously theorised to be Nessie.

However, Gemmell found lots of eel DNA, and posited that there may be giant eels in Loch Ness which might be behind the Nessie sightings. Unfortunately, DNA evidence gives no indication of size.

“We can’t discount the possibility that there may be giant eels in Loch Ness,” Dr Gemmell said. “Therefore we can’t discount the possibility that what people see and believe is the Loch Ness Monster might be a giant eel.”

Foxon’s analysis, though, revealed that the likelihood of finding a one metre long eel in Loch Ness is one in 50,000.

“For a six-metre eel, the probability is practically next to zero,” he added. “So, although there are a great many eels in the Loch, they don’t get very big. Not monstrously big, anyway.”

As for what may actually explain the Loch Ness monster legend, a century-long hoax remains the most probable scenario.

Foxon said “other natural explanations such as wave effects, logs, and the occasional mammal crossing the loch” could be behind Nessie folklore.

“I’d like to think that there was more to it, but there probably isn’t. It is interesting to think about, though,” he said.