Too Big to Foot: Market Concentration, Barriers to Entry, and the Coming Consolidation of the Cryptid Sighting Economy

Humanity has catalogued 1,247 distinct monsters, yet seven of them account for $83.0\%$ of all recorded sightings. Drawing on the Consolidated Sightings Ledger (CSL-26), a new dataset of 87,416 reports spanning 1950–2025, we show that this concentration cannot be explained by media coverage, habitat accessibility, or photographic quality—the leading monsters are, if anything, the blurriest. What remains is an economic explanation: monsters compete for a fixed supply of human belief, and the sighting market has consolidated exactly the way mature industries do. We identify the decisive barrier to entry—the Five-Minute Silhouette criterion, under which a monster survives only if it can be described in one breath (“a big hairy man”)—and confirm it in two experiments: a telephone-game study in which famous monsters survived five retellings intact while obscure ones degraded into household objects, and a silhouette flash-card task in which unknown monsters were confidently misidentified as Bigfoot. By the standards regulators apply to supermarkets, the monster economy is broken: every market segment exceeds the merger-guideline threshold for “highly concentrated,” an unreviewed Bigfoot–Yeti merger is visibly in progress, and our model gives a new monster a $0.3\%$ chance of ever succeeding again. We conclude with remedies. Chief among them: break up Bigfoot.