NorCal Dave
Senior Member.
It seems the world champion Hide-n-Seek player in the bipedal hominid (non-human) category is in the news again. This time its new compelling footage and DNA news about the big fella. Or at least that's how it popped up a number of news feeds of friends and family who shared it with me. Turns out to be a recycled news story form October 2013 near as I can tell, but it does sound compelling:
Source: https://www.cbsnews.com/video/experts-analyze-new-bigfoot-footage/#x
I was going to just pass on it, but if it's popping up on news feeds, pointing out that its from 10 years ago and that nothing ever came of this press release, which is what it was, should be sufficient but a bit of an explanation is in order.
This is actually one of Dr. Melba Ketchum press events that makes up this "news" story. We covered her a bit in our thread (linked below) on the Patterson-Gimlin film of Bigfoot from the '60s, but that thread ran out to 13 pages and the Ketchum reference was just a small blurb on page 6, so a review is needed.
Without getting too deep, Dr. Melba Ketchum was a Texas based veterinarian that specialized in forensic science. She helped identify diseases in large animals like horses. In the mid '00s she beagain to collect what she thought was Bigfoot DNA samples and having them tested. In 2012 she announced what she had discovered:
@Sharon Hill covered Ketchum and her paper for The Skeptical Inquirer back in 2013 and it's a good read. She notes who Ketchum is and how she got started in Bigfootery:
As for the paper, Dr. John Timmer took a look at it for Ars Technica ,also a good read, here's his CV:
So, a blast from the past. Hill's article sums up the media circus leading up to and after the paper was published along with some of Ketchum's inter-related businesses. Timmer covers the results of the paper itself and how they got it wrong.
Patterson-Gimlin film thread:
https://www.metabunk.org/threads/patterson-gimlin-bigfoot-film-is-a-hoax.12254
Source: https://www.cbsnews.com/video/experts-analyze-new-bigfoot-footage/#x
I was going to just pass on it, but if it's popping up on news feeds, pointing out that its from 10 years ago and that nothing ever came of this press release, which is what it was, should be sufficient but a bit of an explanation is in order.
This is actually one of Dr. Melba Ketchum press events that makes up this "news" story. We covered her a bit in our thread (linked below) on the Patterson-Gimlin film of Bigfoot from the '60s, but that thread ran out to 13 pages and the Ketchum reference was just a small blurb on page 6, so a review is needed.
Without getting too deep, Dr. Melba Ketchum was a Texas based veterinarian that specialized in forensic science. She helped identify diseases in large animals like horses. In the mid '00s she beagain to collect what she thought was Bigfoot DNA samples and having them tested. In 2012 she announced what she had discovered:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bigfoot#Melba_Ketchum_press_releaseAfter what The Huffington Post described as "a five-year study of purported Bigfoot (also known as Sasquatch) DNA samples",[194] but prior to peer review of the work, DNA Diagnostics, a veterinary laboratory headed by veterinarian Melba Ketchum issued a press release on November 24, 2012, claiming that they had found proof that the Sasquatch "is a human relative that arose approximately 15,000 years ago as a hybrid cross of modern Homo sapiens with an unknown primate species."
@Sharon Hill covered Ketchum and her paper for The Skeptical Inquirer back in 2013 and it's a good read. She notes who Ketchum is and how she got started in Bigfootery:
Who is Melba Ketchum? She is a veterinarian who graduated from Texas A&M veterinary school. She did not complete a PhD.2 While not an academic, she
runs her own genetics lab and has been a coauthor on several published papers but never a lead author.3
Ketchum would appear on Coast to Coast AM and described her idea of what a Bigfoot was, mostly human and even tried to get a copywrite of sorts for the idea. An idea her paper would later confirm (bold by me):The Ketchum story begins in 2008 when her lab was picked to analyze a suspected Bigfoot/yeti hair from Bhutan collected as part of Josh Gates’s adventure
show, Destination Truth, which airs on the Discovery Channel in the U.S. Ketchum appeared twice on the show, in 2009 and 2010 (Season 3 numbers
9 and 12), as a forensic analyst. She then became one of the “go to” people for those who had collected DNA samples that they thought might be from a
Bigfoot.5
After being unable to get an academic publisher to take her study, it appeared in the Vol. 1, Issue 1 of the journal DeNovo. It was the only paper in that issue and the only issue ever published:With the Destination Truth samples of 2008 apparently the primer for her interest in the subject, in August of 2010, Dr. Ketchum disclosed on the Coast to Coast AM radio program that she had a scientific paper in the works.17 The forthcoming paper provided an excuse for her to avoid discussing the results at the time. However, in the fall of 2010, Ketchum was doing additional interviews about her work.18 Ideas about Bigfoot being a type of human were already formed by other Bigfoot researchers.
A copyright filing in her name dated September of 2010 described a media project related to “a new tribe of living humans.” The theme of a book or video was to be “Sasquatch as a modern human with some genetic mutations accounting for their physical appearance.”19 This copyright notice foreshadowed the results of her DNA study stating that the project would describe “complete Sasquatch
mitochondrial genome sequence and nuclear DNA variations.” Ketchum later brushed aside the notice saying it never came to fruition.20 But, this idea also
corresponded to hypotheses proposed by David Paulides in his book Tribal Bigfoot published in 2009.
DeNovo appeared to be owned by Ketchum:On February 12, 2013, Ketchum commented on social media outlets “Buckle up!” and the next day, the paper appeared along with a new press release.49
The study, “Novel North American Hominins, Next Generation Sequencing of Three Whole Genomes and Associated Studies,” which analyzed DNA from a total of
111 high-quality samples submitted from across the continent, appeared in the inaugural issue of DeNovo: Journal of Science (http://www.denovojournal.com) of February 13. The coauthors were: Ketchum, P.W. Wojtkiewicz, A.B. Watts, D.W. Spence, A.K. Holzenburg, D.G. Toler, T.M. Prychitko, F.
Zhang, S. Bollinger, R. Shoulders, and R. Smith.
https://skepticalinquirer.org/newsl...ct-what-to-believe-about-bigfoot-dna-science/Instead of continuing to shop the paper to other sources, she decided to acquire the rights to this unnamed journal,50 suspected to be the Journal of Advanced Multidisciplinary Exploration in Zoology. Looking into the history of that journal, investigators found it was registered under Ketchum’s name on January 9, 2013. This led to serious ethical questions about self-publishing.50
The DeNovo website was created on February 4, 2013, just nine days prior to the release of the paper. Ketchum claims to have documentation of the prior reviews and from the acquisition of
the new journal. These, and any information on which journals previously rejected the paper, have not yet been released.
As for the paper, Dr. John Timmer took a look at it for Ars Technica ,also a good read, here's his CV:
He noted Ketchum's previously copywritten conclusions:John is Ars Technica's science editor. He has a Bachelor of Arts in Biochemistry from Columbia University, and a Ph.D. in Molecular and Cell Biology from the University of California, Berkeley. John has done over a decade's worth of research in genetics and developmental biology at places like Cornell Medical College and the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center.
But:The paper itself is an odd mix of things. There's a variety of fairly standard molecular techniques mixed in with a bit of folklore and a link to a YouTube video that reportedly shows a sleeping Sasquatch. In some ways, the conclusions of the paper are even odder than the video. They suggest that bigfeet aren't actually an unidentified species of ape as you might have assumed. Instead, the paper claims that bigfeet are hybrids, the product of humans interbreeding with a still unknown species of hominin.
Timmer spoke with Ketchum, and she disagreed:But my initial analysis suggested that the "genome sequence" was an artifact, the product of a combination of contamination, degradation, and poor assembly methods. And every other biologist I showed it to reached the same conclusion.
Without getting into the weeds, Timmer suggests Ketchum's team drew radical conclusions from likely contaminated samples because they refused to admit contamination was possible:Ketchum was completely adamant that contamination wasn't a possibility. "We had two different forensics labs extract these samples, and they all turned out non-contaminated, because forensics scientists are experts in contamination. We see it regularly, we know how to deal with mixtures, whether it's a mixture or a contaminated sample, and we certainly know how to find it. And these samples were clean."
Timmer ultimately says Ketchum got lots of weird results from degraded and contaminated samples and then forced the results into her already pre-conceived theory of human like creatures running around in the forest. Creatures she told him she has seen:On the face of it, there's simply no way to make sense of this—the European and African DNA, the recent time frame for its arrival, the fact that there must have been so many interbreedings.... The obvious interpretation is that the samples were all from humans or contaminated with human DNA, which nicely explains the diversity and modernity of the sequences.
But remember, to Ketchum, that possibility had been ruled out. In the absence of the obvious, her team went with a far less obvious suggestion: sometime during the last glacial period, a diverse group of Europeans and Africans got together and wandered across the vast empty spaces of the Greenland ice sheet and found themselves in North America.
https://arstechnica.com/science/201...-bigfoot-genome-and-the-woman-who-created-it/There's groups of people called habituators. They have them living around their property. And they interact with them, but they're highly secretive because one, people think they're crazy when they say they interact with bigfoot—and I prefer Sasquatch by the way, but bigfoot's easier to say. Finally a group of them came by and said "you want to see 'em? we'll take you and show you." And they did. The clan I was around was used to people and they were just very, very easy to be around—they're real curious about us, and they'd come and look at us, and we'd look at them.
So, a blast from the past. Hill's article sums up the media circus leading up to and after the paper was published along with some of Ketchum's inter-related businesses. Timmer covers the results of the paper itself and how they got it wrong.
Patterson-Gimlin film thread:
https://www.metabunk.org/threads/patterson-gimlin-bigfoot-film-is-a-hoax.12254
