Dean Cain to Host Spike TV’s 10 Million Dollar Bigfoot Bounty

In 10 Million Dollar Bigfoot Bounty, which premieres January 2014, nine teams of “lifelong Bigfoot hunters” and big game hunters travel through the Pacific Northwest and use a state-of-the-art mobile DNA lab to find Sasquatch. Each week they’ll travel to a different Bigfoot “hot zone” in the U.S.

The cash prize is underwritten by Lloyd’s of London. Cain will serve as “expedition leader.”

And about the multi-million dollar poo: Rantamaki says one of the coolest pieces of technology the teams will use in their search is a mobile DNA lab that can provide DNA sequencing results in as little as a day.

“When I saw this, it truly blew my mind,” he tells Yahoo! TV. “It’s not my world, but there’s all different kinds of DNA, obviously, like hair, fur, saliva, stuff that maybe scraped off onto branches … scat is obviously a very big piece [of evidence] in the woods. And for the scat, it’s so crazy that it can be determined, within several hours, what animal it has come from, very specifically, through the DNA sequencing. And even when samples are found, our experts have this knowledge … and in the lab, there’s a textbook that is just filled with pictures of various kinds of scat, from every animal. It shows the picture of the animal, the shape of the scat … it’s all really crazy, but hearing all these folks talk about it is fascinating.”

So, finding Bigfoot really could come down to poo?

“Yes,” Rantamaki says, laughing.

The show, which is already in production, is a fun, but still very serious effort to prove whether or not Bigfoot is real, as the $10 million prize suggests.

Rantamaki promises there will be no room for questioning the winner if someone does indeed snag the big prize on “10 Million Dollar Bigfoot Bounty,” as the substantiation needed to win $10 million includes both photographic evidence and DNA evidence “that has been sequenced and proved to be from an unknown primate.”

“A, it’s $10 million on the line, B, it’s Lloyds of London, so there’s no screwing around on this,” Rantamaki says. “No one who isn’t fully credible, and/or vetted by a lot of people is involved.”

As for whether those involved in making the series believe in Bigfoot’s existence, Rantamaki says he thinks Cain is open to the possibility, while he says he started off as a “cynical television producer,” and is now starting to feel differently. “It really would not surprise me for us to [find out] there’s some new kind of primate within the next couple of years, or even sooner. A lot sooner.

If one of the show’s Bigfoot hunters does discover the big hairy creature, will we find out about it right away, or, in the age of social media, will Spike TV try to keep the discovery under wraps?