'10 Million Dollar Bigfoot Bounty': New Reality Show Hopes To Discover Scientific Proof That Bigfoot Exists

SPIKE is launching a new reality competition series 10 Million Dollar Bigfoot Bounty, offering a grand prize of $10 million to a team that finds definitive proof of the existence of Bigfoot.

The legend of Bigfoot is known the world over, with multiple claims made of proof of existence, mainly consisting of grainy footage and questionable evidence. 10 Million Dollar Bigfoot Bounty is hoping to provide a new take on the search for Bigfoot with a scientific approach. To win the coveted $10 million prize – the largest cash prize offered in any television show – the winners will have to provide definitive proof that Bigfoot exists, through both DNA evidence and photographic evidence.

The show, hosted by Dean Cain, known to many as Clark Kent from his days as Superman on Lois & Clark (1993-1997), pits nine teams of two against each other in a rigorous scientific competition. The teams are an eclectic group, not all are Bigfoot enthusiasts; some are trackers and scientists who don’t believe Bigfoot even exists.

The teams will compete in scientific and tracking challenges, or field tests; for example, in one of the early episodes the teams will have to prove that they can collect a DNA sample from a wild animal. The winning team of these tests will receive various rewards during the ‘Hunt’ portion of the show. Furthermore, each team will have to be able to defend their scientific evidence to the panel of judges, which includes Todd Disotell, professor of anthropology and head of the Molecular Anthropology Laboratory at New York University (NYU) and Natalia Reagan, a primatologist.

Disotell claims that all potential evidence found by the contestants in the show were put through the same rigorous testing any scientific discovery is put through.

“I have been involved in the discovery of… non human primates, and we applied the exact same techniques on this expedition… To me, I wasn’t stretching. I might have stretched a little on the subject matter, but on the techniques and the science that we did, it’s identical to everyday lab work in my molecular lab,” Disotell said in an interview on HuffPost Live.

Reagan says that, as the show’s resident primatologist and one of their scientific authorities, she taught contestants how to collect a sample correctly in the wild, adding that Disotell “didn’t test any sample that wasn’t collected properly.”

Disotell and Reagan are hoping that the scientific procedures showcased in the search for Bigfoot will inspire viewers to learn more about science.

“If you can trick people into learning something, they learn it much better than if you force-feed it to them,” says Disotell.

Cain, the only judge without scientific credentials, is an avid hunter and outdoorsman and lead the expedition through the Pacific Northwest. He says he agreed to host the show as a skeptic, but has come out a bit more willing to accept the possibility that Bigfoot exists.

“I started off as a major skeptic and I’m much less skeptical now than I was,” Cain teased during a visit to Fox & Friends.

The show has already completed filming, meaning that if a team was successful in provin the existence of Bigfoot, they have already taken home the prize. Though the $10 million prize is only for a team who finds evidence of Bigfoot’s existence, the team who comes the closest, or who is the last team standing will receive a $100,000 research grant to continue their search.

10 Million Dollar Bigfoot Bounty premieres Friday, Jan. 10 at 10 p.m. on SPIKE.

– Olivia Truffaut-Wong

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