(Originally posted: 7/21/2013)
I haven’t posted anything here in several months because, for the most part, I haven’t had anything of interest to say. But a few days ago, I came across an article online that just caught me completely off guard, and upset me to boot. I teach a class in physical anthropology that includes a unit on paleoanthropology, and in trawling the internet for interesting tidbits to relate to the calss I came across “Bigfoot genome paper ‘conclusively proves’ that Sasquatch is real” and its follow-up “How the attempt to sequence ‘Bigfoot’s genome’ went badly off track.” My response is past the break.
First, let’s be clear: modern science, so far, does not accept the idea of an 8ft. shaggy hominin indigenous to the Pacific Northwest of North America. There is a staggering absence of evidence to support the existence of such a large primate in such a cold environment, and the few shreds of evidence generally cited are equivocal to the point that they should probably be Occam’s-Razored into oblivion. That being said, I have no a priori reason to object to research into the topic, and should evidence come to light, I’d be one of the first to get excited over it. A supposed genome would, in theory, be one of the most convincing pieces of evidence, and the publication of that finding in a scholarly journal (and reported to the public on Ars Technica) would be conclusive.
Of course, that’s not what happened, and the two Ars Technica articles make it clear that this is all, at best, really just a bunch of wishful thinking and self-delusion on the parts of the people involved. Had that been all it was, I would have passed over the topic without a second thought. But one passage in the second article caught me completely by surprise, and deserves comment, because it shows that there’s more going on here than just wishful-thinking. It is a quote from Dr. Melba Ketchum, one of the leading researchers on the project, as she talked with John Timmer, the Ars Technica columnist. I’ll quote it in full here:
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.
Yes, she appears to be saying that there are multiple groups of humans who are in regular, sustained, and close contact with groups of sasquatch, and who are willing, able, and seemingly eager to talk to scientists. She then proceeded to publish as her “conclusive proof” of their existence some extremely confusing, highly esoteric, DNA evidence taken from apparently quite old hair samples. It is at this point that I went from believing that Dr. Ketchum was a wishful thinker to an outright fraudster. She is identified in the articles as a “forensic scientist,” and apparently one trained in DNA forensics, but she is also apparently not a physical anthropologist, primatologist, or any other specialty one would expect to be involved in this kind of research. However, whatever training she had, she should understand the basics of scientific argument. And this is where the whole thing falls apart.
If, through your “habituator” contacts, you have regular, close contact with a new, undocumented species, you don’t “prove” its existence with a few hairs and a 19 second video clip of a something shaggy breathing in the woods. (Seriously, watch the clip embedded in the first article. A high school drama club would produce a more convincing fake.) You spend months with the animals, taking high quality photos, video, and audio recordings. Extensive, detailed notes and observations, round the clock, from a variety of observers. Take blood, tissue, and scat samples from multiple animals. Invite other scholars–known and trusted authorities with the training and expertise to evaluate the evidence–to come observe the animals themselves, as well as your data collection and analysis. Compile an insurmountable mountain of dozens of kinds of evidence–not one kind of evidence that’s so completely confusing that most real scientists would just assume it was botched.
One might reasonably counter that this kind of study would be too disruptive for the animals–that they would be harmed by it, or that the habituators wouldn’t allow it. This is just rationalization. Animal behavioral research is done all over the world without harming the animals, and the location and identity of the habituators could also easily be hidden by a researcher willing to do so. (After all, the habituators have apparently kept their own identities secret thus far!)
So why, then, didn’t Ketchum’s team of sasquatch researchers do all this, if they had easy access to a “clan” of bigfoots (bigfeet?). This brings me to my ultimate conclusion: Whoever was involved in this–and Dr. Ketchum is just the only one named in the Ars Technica articles–wasn’t doing it to “conclusively prove” the existence of Bigfoot. Anyone with any scientific training would see that this was the wrong way to go about doing that. There must have been some other motivation, and here it is:
By all appearances, they’ve solved that problem… by establishing a brand new journal, called De Novo (I’m not kidding; they apparently bought an existing journal and renamed it). The journal’s site appears to be a mix of clip art and some basic HTML. Though it claims to be “open access,” the site actually charges $30 to see the bigfoot paper (although their press person was kind enough to provide Ars with a free copy). Payment requires a Google Wallet account.
This is a money-making scheme. Knowing that many news-hungry blogs would sieze on such a sensationalistic topic as Bigfoot’s DNA, the people involved set up a system that–to a non-expert–looked professional and scientific, then charged a fee to see “the evidence.” Many gullible people would be driven to their site by such supposedly reputable sources as Ars Technica, and the “scientists” would make off with the money.
Except, I suppose, Ars Technica went ahead and debunked the entire thing right away, so hopefully these scoundrels didn’t make a cent. The Ars Technica articles, on the other hand, don’t call out the fraudsters on this count (aside from the above, very gentle, quote). They could have done more to expose the real motivations, but I suppose that might have seemed too unprofessional. Of well, I have the advantage of not BEING a professional journalist, and I’ll shout scientific integrity from the rooftops.