A word about cryptolinks: we are not responsible for the content of cryptolinks, which are merely links to outside articles that we think are interesting (sometimes for the wrong reasons), usually posted up without any comment whatsoever from me.
Earlier this week I wrote about my experience with Melba Ketchum and the DNA evidence she claims proves the existence of Bigfoot. In short, I had the DNA material tested by a credible Texas scientist and it showed no evidence of a new species.
Ketchum
Ketchum has since responded.
First, she did so on Facebook, offering several possibilities as to why the lab didn’t find evidence of Sasquatch:
One, there is a conspiracy to suppress our findings. Two, they just didn’t care and didn’t believe that there is even the possibility that Sasquatch exists and therefore just wanted to be done with it because they had other projects. Three, they themselves suppressed it for fear that their careers would be damaged. The things that I know for sure are that it was not an adequate analysis, they did not even try to double check or recreate our findings. If they really had an interest, they would have jumped at the chance to resequence the raw samples. Funny thing, I offered the samples to three other places also and nobody was willing to test. Something is just not right. I also offered several people an opportunity to visit a habituation site including this reporter and his lab people so they could have a sighting. Of course they didn’t want that either. Bottom line, nobody except a few of you here even care about the truth. Most would rather perpetuate that BF is a myth or an ape.
Then, in an interview with the Huffington Post, she was more direct:
Ketchum was outraged by Berger’s article, telling HuffPost Weird News this morning, “He’s just out there to create drama.”She bristled at the criticism and said Berger’s work is scientifically flawed.“This is unbelievable — my study is a legitimate study,” she said. “There’s no credibility in his study whatsoever … There’s jealousy out there.”
I’ll get to the legitimacy of Ketchum’s study in a moment.
First, let me address the issue of “drama.” I was done with this issue after writing about it last February. However after that time Ketchum reached out to me. After what I felt was a reasonable interview, I decided to offer her a chance at vindication.
We made a deal in which I would have a highly experienced and reputable geneticist test Ketchum’s DNA samples in his lab. If the evidence backed up Ketchum’s claims, I had a blockbuster story. My geneticist source would have a hand in making the scientific discovery of the decade, or perhaps the century. And Ketchum would be vindicated. It was in all of our interest for the DNA to come back as Sasquatch.
Posts
1 comment:
This is why scientists use peer-reviewed journals; it exposes the papers to credible review before publication. Now, granted this system does sometimes fail; an example being a few climate scientists' work which turned out to be more the product of spaghetti-code and wishful thinking than credible research (the lack of code review here points to much more such rubbish coding in this field). However, Ketchum's work would have been caught by bog-standard peer review.
Unfortunately she chose to publish outside of this sorting mechanism, possibly because peer review would have rejected such dubious work outright. Here we see the results; to mis-quote a New Scientist spoof, just a Fleisch in the Pons rather than the dawn of a whole new error.
Post a Comment