A new documentary series on the Travel Channel sets out to find Bigfoot in the Pacific Northwest. North America’s fabled apelike creature has been a life-long obsession of author and explorer Russell Acord and now he and his colleagues are featured in the new Travel Channel documentary series Expedition Bigfoot , which premiered last night (December 8th) at 10 p.m. ET/PT.

A Live Science article reports more than “10,000 eyewitness accounts” have described Bigfoot encounters in the continental U.S. over the past 50 years and that Bigfoot even has a file at the FBI, that was released to the public on June 5 ^th 1977.

The file revealed that the study of five unidentified ‘suspected’ Bigfoot hairs “were all types of deer”, wrote FBI Assistant Director Jay Cochran, Jr. But that isn’t stopping Acord and his team, who are convinced an undiscovered creature wanders the woodlands of Northwest America.

Fossil Evidence Is a Big (foot) Problem

The Travel Channel researchers scoured the Pacific Northwest, where annually about one-third of all Bigfoot sightings and encounters occur, and using state-of-the-art equipment and computer algorithms the team, including a primatologist, analyzed footprints and ‘possible’ nests. They also recorded what they claim are “vocalizations at Bigfoot hotspots” on a 90,000 acre (36,421 hectare) region of land in central Oregon.

Read more: ancient origins