So yeah, the FBI investigated Bigfoot. Sort of. Scully and Mulder weren’t involved, though, and it’s not like the FBI actually sent agents out into the field with night vision cameras and recordings of female Bigfoot mating calls or anything. They tested some hair samples. The truth is out there, man.

According to History, the FBI’s involvement with the Bigfoot question began in 1976, when a Bigfoot investigator named Peter Byrne sent “15 hairs attached to a tiny piece of skin” to the FBI with a note asking if they could identify it. Bryne, who was the director of the Bigfoot Information Center and Exhibition, said his people had been unable to determine what animal the hair came from, and he wondered if the FBI had ever done any similar analyses on suspected Bigfoot hair.

Now before you start wondering why the FBI didn’t just pass Bryne’s note around the office until they were all tired of laughing at him, well, in those days people were a lot more serious about Bigfoot than they are today. The infamous Patterson video — that’s the one where you see a giant hairy man-ape thingy looking over its shoulder as it saunters away — had only been around since 1967, and a lot of people thought Bigfoot might be a real thing. So after the FBI received Bryne’s request, it wrote back to tell him that it usually deals in criminal investigations, but sometimes makes an exception “in the interest of research and scientific inquiry.” Evidently, at that point, even the FBI still thought the Bigfoot question was a “scientific” one.

But alas, the FBI was unable to confirm the presence of a large, hairy primate in the American wilderness. It sent the hair back in 1977 with a short description of its analysis technique and the conclusion that “the hairs are of deer family origin.” And that concludes the FBI’s Bigfoot investigation.