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Many cultures have legends about lonely man-beasts, and recorded sightings in North America and Asia go back to the early 1800s. Yet despite all these sightings, the photos and footprints are of often questionable origin, and there has never been conclusive proof that these creatures exist. No droppings, no bones, no hair and no bodies have ever been found, alive or dead. This week, geneticists at the University of Alberta are putting the legend to the test by examining hair that is said to come from Bigfoot. The hair was collected by residents in Teslin, Yukon, who claim they found it in a huge footprint left by a three-metre-tall, human-like creature that walked through their gardens. The wildlife geneticist Dave Coltman expects that the hair will turn out to belong to a known mammal, such as a bear or a bison, but he is curious enough to test it. "If Bigfoot is indeed a primate, then we would expect the sample to be closer to humans or chimpanzees or gorillas. That would be kind of cool, wouldn't it?" Regardless of his findings, the myth of Bigfoot does not need hard facts to persist. The creatures are real enough to those who say they have seen them, but opinion is divided about what they are. Some people say Bigfoot is a flesh-and-blood animal. Others, including various Native American tribes, believe it is a spirit being that appears to people in times of crisis, bringing the message that something needs to change. Such creatures are not found only in the huge, empty spaces of North America and Asia. In the UK, similar legends go back centuries. Two years ago, investigators and the media gathered at Bolam Lake, near Newcastle, after a series of sightings of a tall, shadowy figure. During a week in the lakeside park, six of the group saw the so-called Beast of Bolam. Richard Freeman, of the Centre for Fortean Zoology, says that one of his colleagues was among the witnesses. "What they saw was not Bigfoot," he says. "In a park not far from a city centre, you are not going to get a nine-foot ape-like creature. England simply doesn't have the habitat to support it." In his years as a monster hunter, Freeman has travelled the world collecting stories of strange creatures, and the same types appear again and again. He calls this the "international monster template": dragons and other giant reptiles; large ape-like creatures such as Sasquatch; little people such as fairies and goblins; giant birds; and phantom dogs and cats. "I believe these are equivalents of the creatures that lived on the plains of Africa millions of years ago, which our ancestors had to deal with. We now carry a fossil memory of these creatures. Under certain conditions, the human mind creates 3D images of these equivalents." Sceptics such as Benjamin Radford, of the Skeptical Inquirer magazine, also believe that these sightings are our minds playing tricks on us. It is surprisingly easy to fool ourselves into believing what we want to believe. Out in the wild, in places already known as "Bigfoot locations", someone may see something dark or hairy or fast out of the corner of their eye that startles them. "If they already think there is a Bigfoot in the area, it is easy to move from saying 'I saw something, I don't know what it is' to 'I saw something and it's Bigfoot.'" The tests will soon show whether the hair belongs to a creature unknown to science; until then, the truth lies in the eye of the beholder.