I believe him.
One of our field helpers years ago was a WA state game warden. He called one night to say he couldn’t make it the following day. A couple days later he explained.
They had received a call from a lady that said a bigfoot crossed her fence and left a chunk of hair on the fence. So this game warden, along with a biologist from the University of Washington drove 3 hours south to investigate.
I’m on the fence about bigfoot. But obviously the state is interested in them to spend that kind of effort to get some hair. If it was just to keep the lady happy they could have said “Take some tweezers and grab the hair and put in a baggie and mail it to us and we’ll get on that first thing!”