(NewsNation) — Bigfoot? Sasquatch? Yeti?
Take a deep breath, because you probably didn’t see what you think you saw. Probably.
New research suggests reported Bigfoot sightings correlate with the population of black bears in the area. The more black bears an area is home to, the more likely people are to believe they saw the allegedly mythical creature.
The study, published in the Journal of Zoology, found that for every 5,000 black bears, there’s an average of one Bigfoot sighting. In other words, where there’s more bears, more people think they saw Bigfoot.
Florida, however, is an outlier. The state has a low black bear population of about 4,000 and a large human population of nearly 22 million, but it ranks No. 3 in the nation, with a total of 339 documented bigfoot sightings, according to ESPN Southwest Florida.
Black bears are the most common species of bear in North America and can be spotted in 32 states.
Since the mid-1970s, prominent paleontologists and primatologists have repeatedly reached the conclusion that a creature fitting witness descriptions of Bigfoot does not exist.
Darren Naish, a British paleontologist and self-described wannabe-Bigfoot-believer, wrote in 2016 that modern evidence — which relies heavily on “innumerable witness accounts” and even fur samples (which have since been identified as being of deer origin by the FBI) — are not enough to support Bigfoot’s existence.
Instead, Naish believes the notion of sasquatches roaming the woods of North America can be attributed to people “seeing all manner of different things, combining it with ideas, memes and preconceptions they hold in their minds, and interpreting them as encounters with a monstrous, human-like biped,” he wrote in an article published in Scientific American.