Bigfoot News April 16, 2013

Photos of Hank (the Bigfoot Rick Dyer shot) released on Facebook. Hank is the Bigfoot that Rick Dyer killed in Texas last September. There is a private group on Facebook made up of many folks who have, among other interests, the belief that Dyer is hoaxing his story about the Bigfoot he killed.

Today, April 16, a photo of dead Hank was released by someone in the group to some of the group members. The person who released it has an NDA with Dyer. Everyone who saw the photo also now has an NDA. Either no one saved the photo, or they have all pledged not to release it until after April 30. All of the folks who saw the photo are now convinced that the Dyer story is true.

The person who first posted this story is named Don Boucher, and was one of Dyer’s fiercest critics. Stefan Beaudoin was similarly a ferocious critic of Dyer’s who has now converted. A number of people who formerly thought Dyer was hoaxing are now converting to believers en masse. They are issuing apologies to Dyer, and a number say they are going to see Shooting Bigfoot in Toronto on April 30.

The photo shows Hank dead on the ground with considerable damage to his mouth and jaw from a 30.06 bullet. A number of people are standing around Hank in a circle, including Dyer, Morgan Matthews, director of  Shooting Bigfoot, and members of the Shooting Bigfoot crew.

One problem with this photo is that the damage described in the photo does not line up with the more minimal damage described by Musky Allen when he went to see Dyer’s Bigfoot.

No copies of this photo have been released on the Web, but as you can see if you remember that Musky Allen got two copies of dead Hank photos in his email, copies of dead Hank are definitely starting to float around the Internet. It is perfectly possible that one may turn up before April 30.

Here is the text of Boucher’s message:

Don Boucher
There is a group of us “haters” who have been discussing this thing for quite some time now. Recently, one of our members asked for any proof whatsoever, and someone sent us a pic, one that we have heard mentioned, but didn’t believe existed.

The pic I saw showed the body of a what is undeniably a bigfoot, which definite facial trauma evident from what a 30-06 round to the back of the head would do. Standing around the body is Rick, Morgan Matthews and several of the “Shooting Bigfoot” crew.

I would like to apologize to FB/FB, and Rick Dyer, as well as Dyer’s supporters. I have been mean, vindictive and un fair, but in light of this humbling evidence, I’m going to have to say that I have crossed the fence.

Rick Dyer webpage up. Rick Dyer has a webpage up for Rick Dyer Films, a film company he has started. This is one of the worst webpages I have ever seen. There are horrible grammar and spelling errors all over the place, and design is horrific.

Why Morgan Matthews is not coming forward with information about the killing of a Bigfoot during the shooting of his movie, Shooting Bigfoot. A commenter notes astutely that Matthews is a professional filmmaker, and this would not be a smart thing for him to do:

He is, first and foremost, a professional filmmaker, a successful and experienced one, and he knows that he will not only deflate the impact of his film’s debut by coming forward prior to its release but also look like a nutjob and idiot as well; this should be very simple for most to understand without having to spend too much time thinking about it.

It’s funny how often so many attempt to deal with their own impatience, fear of disappointment and inability to achieve instant gratification by attempting to invalidate who or what they perceive as the source of their self-generated expectations and fear.

In a vacuum bereft of the answers they want and for which they cannot wait, they suddenly become Sherlock Holmes. They must rationalize their impatience rather than simply acknowledge it as such. This has to do with emotional IQ; there is a notably famous study from the 50s involving children and jellybeans, but I digress. It’s the same tendency that causes a guy to leave message after message on a girl’s voicemail when he’s worried he’s about to get dumped or that she’s cheating, and she hasn’t called him back in 15 minutes.

No damage to Hank’s face proves Hank was not shot with a 30.06. Supposedly, a 30.06 causes such extensive damage that if Hank was shot with such a weapon, his face would be badly messed up. Since Hank’s face is not damaged as per Musky Allen’s report when he went to see it, therefore the story is a lie. The rejoinder to this accusation is that Musky did say that there was jaw damage to the Bigfoot, but it was minimal.

Government research facility housing Hank was built specifically to house and study him. One interesting story coming out lately is that the US government agreed to build the storage facility housing Hank if Dyer would let the state store it there and study it while it was there. Dyer apparently convinced the government to build this small facility where Hank is being housed.

The government agreed to build it apparently on the grounds that they would have a chance to study it for several months before it was released. I know it seems odd that the state would build a facility just to house and study Hank on Rick’s request, but that it’s certainly possible, and that is what people are saying was done.

Rick Dyer, sociopath? As Dyer is about to become world famous, it is certainly topical for us to explore Dyer’s past, including his criminal record and repeated hoaxing. We also need to explore the considerably pathological personality of this fellow, which the world will find out about soon enough anyway. The personalities of famous people are always topical, especially if they are as pathological and antisocial as Dyer’s is.

A commenter on my site objects to my calling Dyer a sociopath and provides evidence that Dyer is either not a sociopath or that he is not very sociopathic.

I’m more than a bit confused as to why you continue to maintain that Dyer is an “extreme sociopathic personality”.

To my understanding, sociopaths have little to no concern for the welfare or happiness of others, which is inconsistent with Dyer’s activities in helping the homeless, which he does in his home of Las Vegas, not just with the homeless people who were in the camp in San Antonio. I suppose one could stretch things and claim that he is such a devious sociopath that he does this to mask his tendencies and give the appearance of a “good person”, but that could be, potentially, nothing more than specious conjecture.

He regularly admits to being wrong about previous misstatements and apologizes readily, something sociopaths generally are extremely loathe to do, yes? The few times detractors have the nerve to call into his show, he doesn’t seek to take control by constantly speaking over them, shouting them down or hanging up (not the traits of a control-freak, arguably). In multiple cases, I have witnessed him “become ok” with people whom he was feuding and who apologized and cleared the air with him (sociopaths aren’t usually very forgiving, to my knowledge).

He also frequently expresses admiration for people who “do the right thing”, in his eyes; again, giving praise freely and without clear opportunity for reward is not a very sociopathic tendency (unless, again, we label this as nothing more than cultivated behavior intended to give the appearance of nobility and that is the reward he seeks).

From watching the guy’s shows now for the last several months, as he sits in front of a webcam, unscripted, for hours at a time, I see someone who becomes indignant and snarky towards people who malign him, but that’s not an exclusively sociopathic trait, it’s extremely common behavior which all of us see regularly and most of us have engaged in from time-to-time, I’m certain.

As far as why he hates you, it’s for this reason: he can’t hang with being labeled a sociopath; and if he were to be reasonably diagnosed as one, I don’t think one needs a degree in psychology to conclude that he is far from an “extreme” type; by that definition, I’d have to say that about 50% of everyone I meet is an “extreme” sociopath.

This is a good comment, and in Dyer’s favor, we should present the other side to the argument that he is sociopathic.

In response, I would say that I never called him an “extreme sociopath.”

If he is sociopathic at all, he is a “controlled sociopath,” as I have discussed previously. Controlled sociopaths are “legal criminals” whereas uncontrolled sociopaths are “illegal criminals.” The ranks of law, medicine, politics, business, law enforcement and the military are filled with controlled sociopaths. Crooked lawyers, crooked doctors, crooked cops, crazy/psycho soldiers and officers, crooked businessmen, crooked politicians – you get the picture.

The controlled sociopath has simply controlled his sociopathic tendencies enough to keep himself for the most part out of jail or prison. The motivation is that the controlled sociopath does not want to go to prison, so he controls his behavior and channels it in a legal direction.

Rick is not an extreme sociopath. Mostly what he is is a narcissist. But he does have sociopathic tendencies. This is abundantly clear. There is a Psychopathy Checklist out there, the PCL-R, authored by Robert Hare. Obviously he is going to get an elevated score on that list.

Certain professions such as used car salesman are full of controlled sociopaths. Rick is a used car salesman.

Rick is a con artist. It has been theorized that most con artists are sociopaths.

Some sociopaths do engage in things like helping the homeless, being gurus dedicated to the common good, etc. Although I agree with the commenter that helping the homeless shows a good side to this complicated fellow’s personality.

The viciousness with which he goes after his enemies is totally over the top and makes no sense at all. For instance, he is currently libeling me. He is making up lies about me out of whole cloth. He knows full well that these are lies, but he just makes them up anyway.

One of them is that I served two years in a state prison. I have never incarcerated in any prison, much less a state prison, and I have not spent more than six hours in jail in my entire life. If I had actually served two years in prison, that should be pubic record, and anyone could go and look it up for themselves. But there is nothing there because it never happened.

Dyer has hoaxed many times. He is a serial hoaxer. Hoaxing is antisocial behavior.

He brags that he made $650,000 off of defrauding the American public. Taking pride in defrauding others is antisocial behavior.

At least $50,000 of that was simply stolen money. Rick just stole that money, period. The victim didn’t pretty charges because he was in on the hoax, but Rick did steal that money. Stealing money is antisocial behavior.

In 2010, Rick bragged that on his Bigfoot hunting expeditions, he had a friend run by in a Bigfoot suit to fleece the people he charged $500 a head to go on his expeditions. Rick laughed about what idiots they were as he ripped them off. Defrauding people on your expeditions is antisocial behavior.

Sociopaths think others are morons who deserve to be fleeced. They laugh about their victims and think they deserve to get taken for being stupid. This is Rick’s behavior towards his victims.

Rick recently stole $17,000 from a victim in Canada. The guy ordered two Corvettes from Rick, and Rick just stole the money and never delivered the Corvettes. Rick avoided a conviction by agreeing to deliver the Corvettes. That’s very antisocial behavior – stealing $17,000.

Rick beat up his pregnant wife, Lily Dyer. She called the cops and had him arrested. He avoided conviction by agreeing not to beat her up anymore. Beating up your pregnant wife is antisocial behavior.

However, the commenter makes an interesting case that Dyer is a complicated fellow, and in certain respects he does not display classic sociopathic behavior. Instead, in these regards, Rick is quite normal. And to be fair to Rick, I think my commenter above notes that Rick indeed appears to have a good side. I would certainly agree that Dyer is not a pure sociopath, but I believe he is a pretty antisocial fellow, and he would probably get an elevated PCL-R score.

I am not particularly upset by Dyer’s past if I saw some evidence that he was going to knock it off and turn it all around. But I don’t see that. Rick’s going to keep on being pathological and antisocial into the foreseeable future, even after he becomes world famous. No doubt we will be reading about his misdeeds in the paper.

Chuck Prahl provides evidence for Dyer’s sociopathy. In his interesting article here, Chuck asks (italics mine):

I must admit if Dyer does have a dead Bigfoot on ice, and his name is linked to Bigfoot forever more in every history book and documentary on the big fella, I personally will cry and laugh at the same time.

If you listen to the guy and watch his facial expressions on his adults only Internet/Youtube radio show, he doesn’t act like a man who has made the most important biological discovery in 500 years.

That tells me he is either lying about the whole thing or more likely the guy has no emotions about the subject at all. I have heard him try to be emotional about the circus he has made of his life since this alleged shooting went down last September, and he comes off like a Grade B actor without any heart or soul. He puts more emotion into discussing a car deal he just completed then a man who just made the most important discovery concerning our human ancestors in 500 years.

I have seen how just a fleeting few second encounter with bigfoot as changed men and woman’s entire life and how they become obsessed with getting just one more sighting just so they can say they were not hallucinating the first time. Then you have Rick Dyer who says he shot and killed one and gets more excited talking about the new wrap for his SUV then I ever heard him talk about seeing an 8 foot hairy monster lying on the ground where he just put a bullet through its brain.

On the other hand it might take a narcissist like Dyer to actually kill one of these creatures without having the emotional baggage that might haunt a normal human being having murdered a creature that resembles us in so many ways.

Prahl inadvertently proves an excellent point about Dyer. Dyer shows little or no emotions when discussing the scientific find of the century.

Others have seen Bigfoots for only a few seconds and were changed for life, and Rick put a bullet in one’s head while it was charging him and a filmmaker, then spent the next few months trucking the thing around, having it embalmed and autopsied, having the government build a place to store it, dealing with cops ready to arrest him for homicide on a moment’s notice, having his whole life turned completely upside down with all of the sordid details of his antisocial past revealed for the world to see, on and on, and Rick hardly even bats an eye.

He gets more excited about the newest detail he put on his SUV than he does about the incident that is going to land him in the history books for all time.

The answer to the riddle of this paradox is simple: Rick is a sociopath. Rick lacks any emotional baggage about murdering a fellow hominid because he doesn’t have any emotions to store in his limbic suitcase. You need have some emotions in the first place to get to where you are lugging around emotional baggage, and Rick doesn’t have any. Sociopaths don’t have emotional baggage. They never do.

Chuck says:

If you listen to the guy and watch his facial expressions on his adults only Internet/Youtube radio show, he doesn’t act like a man who has made the most important biological discovery in 500 years. That tells me he is either lying about the whole thing or more likely the guy has no emotions about the subject at all.

Exactly! Rick’s not lying, so the opposite is true. Rick simply lacks any complex emotions at all, as all sociopaths do. The Facebook Find Bigfoot guys described Rick as having “balls of steel” to come out of a tent hoisting a rifle and bead on a Bigfoot only yards away, then chase it as tries to run you down while you pump two bullets into it. Of course he has balls of steel. Rick is fearless. All sociopaths are fearless. It’s a hallmark of the disorder.

Chuck again:

I have heard him try to be emotional about the circus he has made of his life since this alleged shooting went down last September, and he comes off like a Grade B actor without any heart or soul. He puts more emotion into discussing a car deal he just completed then a man who just made the most important discovery concerning our human ancestors in 500 years.

Precisely! Since the sociopath lacks real emotions, he tries to mimic them. What emotions he does display are typically fake emotions, conjured up just for the use of other people. The sociopath figures out what emotions you want him to feel in that situation or what emotions he needs to feel in a situation and then he conjures up fake emotions to show everyone what he thinks they want and need from him. But they aren’t real feelings – they are fakes, acting jobs.

Dyer vows to continue murdering Bigfoots. Dyer recently commented that he is committed to live capturing a Bigfoot, but if he can’t do that, he will shoot and kill another one. This is a depressing comment. Many of us thought that Dyer had a human element in his heart when he appeared to break down and express remorse over the killing of Hank.

However, with this statement, it shows that Dyer has learned nothing. He knows that Bigfoots are human and killing them is murder. But he has no real remorse for killing Hank as he has vowed to kill another Bigfoot. This is classic sociopathic behavior as sociopaths in general do not experience remorse for their antisocial acts.

The Rick Dyer mental trap. People are locked into a trap.

The Dyer skeptics are a classic example of this.

Dyer Skeptic (A). I hate Rick for all sorts of excellent reasons based on observable truths, therefore Rick is lying. Dyer is a scumbag and a repeat hoaxer, therefore, he could not have possibly killed a Bigfoot. But that fails Logic 101. It’s perfectly possible for Dyer to be a scumbag and a repeat hoaxer and also to have killed a Bigfoot. Rather unlikely, but it’s quite possible. Ask any Logic professor.

The other side is locked into an identical trap.

Dyer Believer (B). Rick killed a Bigfoot, and we believe him, therefore we love Rick Dyer, he’s the greatest thing since sliced bread, and we hate all of Rick’s evil enemies.

Almost no one seems to take the position that I do:

1. Rick Dyer is lower than whale crap, and that’s at the bottom of the ocean, and he’s also a serial hoaxer and a criminal. I hate him with every fiber of my being.

2. As unlikely as it sounds, despite (1) being true, he did indeed shoot and kill a Bigfoot! That means I believe him.

“I hate Dyer’s guts, but he killed a Bigfoot” seems to be so mentally contorting that almost no one is capable of twisting their brain into the cerebral pretzel that’s needed to think that way.

David Paulides tried to strong-arm habituation site owner into handing over all of his Bigfoot hair samples to Paulides. The man in question owns the Smith River habituation site and may be named Kirk Stewart. This site was written up in the papers. The owner reported that a possible Bigfoot had been coming onto his rural Del Norte County, California property for some time, eating his watermelons and stealing pheasants from his shed.

What was odd when the pheasants were taken is that the gate has a latch on it. The invader would go to the shed, unlock the latch, go inside and steal a pheasant or two, re-latch the shed on its way out, and take off with the pheasants! This convinced the owner that no ordinary animal was stealing his pheasants.

This man is very mad at Paulides, accusing Paulides of trying to strong-arm the man into handing over all of his Bigfoot samples. Paulides tried to cajole, threaten, browbeat, con and strong-arm the guy into handing over all of his Bigfoot hair samples to Paulides. The man did end up handing over most of the samples to Paulides, but he kept two samples for himself which Paulides kept on demanding he hand over to Paulides. The guy then told Paulides to “f– off”.

One of the two retained samples has been given to Dr. Brian Sykes of Oxford, who is running his own Bigfoot DNA study. The man has a sample in to Dr. Melba Ketchum’s Bigfoot DNA, but has zero confidence in Melba and Paulides (who is sort of Melba’s partner in the DNA study) to deliver the goods. Hence he is quite happy that Sykes has the hairs, and the man is hopeful that Sykes can find something usable out of them.

Paulides is now running around all over the place touting the man’s hair samples as his own.

Paulides is a real scumbag, and he’s one of the worst people in Bigfootery. He has a history as a con artist (he was forced to resign from the Palo Alto Police Department for engaging in a fraud using city government stationery). I don’t mind that Paulides has a bad history as long as he changes and knocks it off, but all indications are that Paulides is still as slimy as he was when he was a crooked cop, and he hasn’t changed one bit. He’s just changed professions, from crooked cop to crooked Bigfoot organization leader.

In addition, many have accused Paulides of continuing to con people with his Bigfoot books. The books contain many false statements, lies, incorrect inferences and false sources. The excellent Steven Streufert has done a great job of taking apart Paulides’ books on Steven’s website.

Paulides has authored a number of Missing 411 books that are, granted, interesting. I have copies of them and have looked them over. Paulides is apparently making the case that Bigfoots are running around North America abducting and killing children and adults from wilderness areas and national parks. While this may indeed be true, and Paulides may have uncovered cases of people being hauled off and killed by Bigfoots, unfortunately, his books do prove that, and some of Paulides inferences are just wrong.

For instance, two of the oddities that Paulides addresses are removal of clothing in cold or freezing weather and burrowing into the ground. However, both clothing removal even in very cold weather (paradoxical undressing) along with burrowing are well known responses to hypothermia (a collapse in body temperature due to exposure to cold weather). But clothing removal and burrowing in these cases are probably just related to hypothermia in the woods and no doubt have nothing to do with Bigfoot abductions. So part of Paulides’ theory is simply wrong.

In addition, Paulides has not been forthcoming about the theme of his books.

While his books are obviously meant to imply that Bigfoots are kidnapping and killing people in the woods, in multiple interviews he denies that this is what the books are about; instead he says the books are simply about missing persons in the woods. That there are missing persons in the woods is not particularly interesting, and one wonders why it was necessary to write three whole books about such a mundane topic. So Paulides is misleading us about the purpose of his books.

In addition, all of Paulides’ books were self-published by CreateSpace. CreateSpace is a good self-publishing outfit, but self-publishing itself is a dubious enterprise because the finished product looks so unprofessional. I have now received several self-published books via CreateSpace, and all of them look quite unprofessional, though some have been well-written. They have layout problems, and they all look like they badly needed an editor. The overall effect screams amateurish and unprofessional.

This is also the case with Paulides’ books. Paulides is not a particularly good writer, though he writes better than the average man on the street. There are all sorts of writing errors strewn through his books. The guy needs an editor something awful. The layout is very bad, and the organization of the books is chaotic and makes little sense.

Nevertheless, if Bigfoots are indeed kidnapping and killing folks in the woods, Paulides’ books are a good “pilot study” that will help to stimulate hopefully much better studies of this phenomenon.

Melba Ketchum violating her agreement with Wally Hersom and Derek Randles. The agreement states that the Bigfoot steak tissue from the Sierra Kills that she did not use is the property of Hersom and Randles. She apparently has quite a bit of tissue left after her testing, and she is simply refusing to hand it over to Derek and Wally as per her charming personal style.

Both men have made repeated requests to Melba to sent the rest of the tissue to them, but nothing has been forthcoming, and it’s been three weeks so far. Melba keeps saying that she is going to send the tissue, but nothing ever shows up.

If I know her well, nothing ever will show up. This looks very bad as apparently she is already on record saying that she did not want 3rd party testing of the Sierras tissue, or at least this is how Bart Cutino and Justin Smeja read things.

No Haplotype A in Bigfoot steak. The tissue from the Sierra Kills was sent out by Cutino and others to be tested to see if results matched up with Ketchum’s. The results came back “human” and “Black bear.” Skeptics of these results say that two different human haplotypes were found in the sample – Amerindian or “A” and European. Actually, only a European haplotype was found in the sample, and that haplotpye is assumed to be Justin’s. The haplotype is “Eastern European,” and Justin is Polish.

Evidence that Justin Smeja is telling the truth about the Sierra Kills. Bart Cutino eavesdropped on Justin and the driver talking about the Sierra Kills when they had no idea that he was listening to him. They spoke about it as an actual event that really occurred. If they really faked the whole thing, why would they talk about it as an actual event when they thought no one was listening?

Evidence backing body recovery story for the Sierra Kills. According to Justin, he and the driver went back 1 month later, on November 12, 2010, and found the Bigfoot steak under three feet of snow. Many have questioned this story for a variety of reasons. However, Cutino has seen photos from the body recovery mission of that day. The photos show Justin holding up the Bigfoot steak, and they are time-stamped with November 12, 2010 on them. So it appears that Justin’s body recovery story is true at least in part.

Bigfoot News April 12, 2013

Warning: Long! Runs to 43 pages on the web.

Morgan Matthews has no Bigfoot body. Morgan Matthews of Minnow Films has issued a statement saying that he personally and Minnow as a company is not in possession of any Bigfoot body. Thanks to Rick Dyer’s blog for breaking this info to us. The report was from a personal phone call to Matthews himself.

Photos of the Dyer Bigfoot (Hank) surface. At least three photos of Hank, dead, have surfaced. They were emailed to Musky Allen, who unfortunately forwarded them on Dyer, who got pretty upset as he received them on his radio show.

The first two photos show what looks like a crime scene with terrain similar to the shooting scene in San Antonio, Texas. There are a dozen or so men standing around, and Dyer is one of them. Hank is lying dead on the ground and the men are circled around him.

The third photo shows a group of  men attempting to load Hank, who is on some sort of a platform, into the back of some sort of a truck. This photo was apparently taken as they were getting ready to transport Hank to Las Vegas. Another version says that the photo is of Hank in the back of the truck as it was being transported to the facility.

Rick took the photos after they were sent to him and acted pretty mad that they were released. Allen has apparently not released them to anyone else. It appears that DJ Bashers may have been the one who released the photos in a pique of anger. Bashers had just been demoted as Vice President of Rick’s company, and his anger over this may have caused him to leak the photos. DJ had indeed seen Hank as he was being loaded onto the truck in San Antonio.

Both Bashers and Musky have signed NDA’s with Dyer. Even if Bashers did release the photos, he might not admit it as it no doubt violates his NDA. NDA’s can be pretty intimidating documents. Bashers may be related to Rick, possibly a cousin.

Where do the pics come from? Apparently a number of pics of Hank were taken, and someone got their hands on a few of them when they were not supposed to.

There was a note attached to the pics telling Musky that he could use the pics to end some of the arguments over whether or not Dyer was hoaxing. Apparently the person forwarding the pics was concerned because Musky had taken some heat over his position on the Dyer matter, and the sender wanted Musky to use the pics to ameliorate his position in the debate. I do know that the pics came from the US, not the UK, and that they did not come to Musky’s Facebook account. Instead they went to his email. However, Musky’s email account is not well known, so this person has some inside information.

At present, we only know of three people who have seen the photos: Musky, the person who sent them to Musky, and Rick Dyer, who received them from Musky.

Unfortunately, the Dyer detractors are so intransigent that even the release of those three pics would hardly budge one single person over to Rick’s side. It is sad the way this thing has gotten politicized.

Shooting Bigfoot press kit says Matthews suffered “scars” during the shooting of the movie. The press kit for the movie does not have a lot of information, but it does say that Matthews suffered “physical and mental scars” in the shooting of the movie. That is very interesting. The physical scars may refer to Hank attacking Matthews after the initial shot, knocking Matthews down, or may refer to the fist fight that ensued afterwards.

The phrase may also refer to scars that Matthews got in a wild fistfight that occurred between Dyer and Matthews and possibly the rest of the crew after Hank was killed. The fight happened because Dyer had created a gigantic mess by killing an actual Bigfoot in the shooting of the movie. The crew may also have sympathized with the dead Hank. They may also have been mad at Dyer for endangering Matthews life by shooting Hank in the back, causing it to charge Matthews and Rick.

Blurb from Finding Bigfoot discusses scars incurred by Matthews in filming the movie.

Top Bigfoot Forums administrator now supports Dyer. A top BFF administrator now says that he has inside information about the Dyer shooting that “prevents him from declaring it not true.” This person had apparently been a strong supporter of the hoax theory for a long time.

Dallas Gilbert says, “Rick Dyer saved Morgan Matthews life.” Someone named “Dallas” called in to one of Dyer’s radio shows and made that statement. This refers to how Dyer shot Hank in the head as he was charging Matthews. The dying Hank then attacked Matthews, knocking him down on its way to trying to get to Rick.

Matthews was apparently injured when Hank attacked him. According to Dallas, if Rick would not have shot Hank, since he was coming at Matthews, he would have killed Matthews or at least hurt him badly as he was attacking Morgan at the time. Dallas can only refer to Dallas Gilbert, who is one of the people featured in Shooting Bigfoot. How did Gilbert learn this? Gilbert must have talked to Matthews, who confirmed the story about Matthews nearly being killed on the set of Shooting Bigfoot.

So Gilbert has apparently signed on to the shooting story. I suppose he is in on the hoax too, eh?

What will Shooting Bigfoot show? The movie will apparently show everything up to the shooting of Hank. After Hank is shot, the scene will then switch to Matthews on a plane flying back to the UK. He is filming himself, and the bruises on his face can be seen. Then the movie ends. You will walk out the theater wondering what you just saw.

Everything following the shooting, including the fight between Matthews and Dyer, the immediate aftermath of the shooting, the transportation of Hank’s body to Las Vegas and its autopsy, was also filmed and will be shown in a documentary filmed by Dyer and his investors. This documentary will be released by Rick and his team soon after Finding Bigfoot is released on April 30.

Mess surrounding immediate scene of Hank’s shooting cleared up. Rick first shot Hank in the back, and then Hank turned around and charged Rick. Hank knocked Matthews down on his way to Rick. Rick then circled around in back of Hank and shot him in the back of the head. Morgan was shooting film the whole time.

Presumably, not only was Morgan endangered by Hank attacking him, but Rick’s shot from the back also placed Morgan in the line of fire. So both shots at Hank definitely endangered Morgan too, but arguably Rick had to shoot when Hank started attacking Morgan.

Matthews’ reaction to the whole mess, the kill, being knocked to the ground, or both, was to physically assault Dyer in outrage. A fistfight between the two men then broke out which was soon broken up by the crew. Apparently no criminal charges were filed by either side due to the fight.

Chart makes the case that Dyer is not hoaxing. There are two sides to the Dyer mess. One says he is hoaxing, and the other says that he really did shoot a Bigfoot. The chart below lays out the arguments that Dyer is hoaxing and attempts to offer rejoinders to all of them, making the case that the story is true. The chart also mentions me and my friend Chris Noel as two of the most prominent Bigfoot writers who also happen to support Dyer, arguing that as evidence in favor of Dyer’s story.

Click to enlarge. Large file. Chart makes the case that the Dyer shooting is a true story. Chart was taken from the Bigfoot Warz website. The chart was done by David Durrett.

Politicization of the Rick Dyer mess. As noted above, the Dyer mess has been hopelessly politicized. Most people think it’s a hoax, and most of those hate Dyer. A smaller number think it is real, and most of them like Dyer. Now I take a medium position. I despise Rick Dyer, but I do think he has a body.

Not that I want to be friendly with the guy anyway, but the politicization of the hoax has somewhat prevented me from being friendlier to Dyer. After all, Steve Kulls still has email contact with Dyer, and Kulls is his worst enemy. Dyer won’t even have email contact with me. Not that I want it, but it might be nice to have some sort of contact, like the way opposing generals in a war have a phone line to each other.

The problem is that as soon as it comes out that I am “in with” Dyer, my name is mud, and I am “in on the hoax.” Then the smearing, digging up dirt on me and other skullduggery begins. So tragically, this means that the best situation is that Dyer and I remain at utter loggerheads.

Rumor in Sierra Kills story verified. I suggested a long time ago that in between the Sierra Kills and the body recovery mission a month later that Justin and a major Bigfoot researcher (I do not know who yet) went back to the scene of the Sierra Kills. Justin and everyone around him, including Derek Randles, have always denied that this is true. However, I have recently confirmed that Justin and this man did indeed make an attempt to go back there, but the story is that they were stopped by the huge amount of snow in the area and were not able to make it to scene. Therefore, the standard Sierra Kills story is not correct and may have to be amended.

More answers to Sierra Kills questions (rejoinders from the group around Justin answering all theories about the Kills). People around the scene continue to insist that the standard story is more or less correct. Let us look at some of the problems with the story:

Adrian Erickson stated to a source that he got a phone call from Melba Ketchum soon after the Sierra Kills. During that phone call, Ketchum stated that she had received two samples from the Kills with two different colors, one reportedly from the baby Bigfoot and one from the adult Bigfoot. The baby sample and all mention of it subsequently vanished off the face of the Earth. That was the last anyone has ever heard about it. Melba herself now says that she only received one sample, and that was from the adult.

Everyone around the story says this is not true.

One source said, “Well, Melba is a liar. She’s not to be trusted. She may have been lying about that.”

Erickson has not commented on the story, but he denies a lot of obvious truths that I report also. Actually he sends his person hit man, Randy Brisson, out to deny the truths that I report. I guess we can expect more of that shortly.

Justin and the driver have 16 pounds of Bigfoot. Justin told a friend of his that he and the driver had 16 pounds of Bigfoot stashed in freezers in a 25 mile radius around Sacramento. People around Justin all insist that he only has two pounds or so. In a phone call with me, Justin denied that he had ever told anyone he had 16 pounds.

Size of Bigfoot steak. According to Richard Stubstad, Ketchum described the steak as 4″ X 3″ X 2.5″, and Justin said that it was 1/8 of the sample. Stubstad calculated the weight of that size to 2 pounds. This lines up with 16 pounds. The size of the steak has now shrunken to 1″ X 1″ X 1″ as per Randles and Smeja, and they now say that the steak weighed 1/4 pound. Everyone around Justin continues to insist that only 1/4 pound was sent in and only 2 pounds were taken.

Recovery story makes no sense. A 600 pound Bigfoot simply does not get reduced down to two pounds of flesh in only one month in the woods, even after being scavenged. At the very least, all of the bones would have been present in addition to the flesh. It makes no sense that only a scrap of flesh was left along with no bones. Everyone around Justin continues to hold to the original version of the story, offering various unlikely scenarios for why the body had been reduced to such an implausible condition in such a short period of time.

Body of baby being stored near Palo Alto, California in a white locker owned by Wally Hersom. This is just a rumor, and the person won’t tell me how they know this. This person is a biggie in the Bigfoot scene but is widely regarded as “out there” and someone who pushes some pretty wild theories. Others say he is either hoaxing or simply imagining things. In other words, many think this person is a “flake.” This person has not yet produced any concrete evidence from their habituation site. At the moment, there is no evidence that the baby is being stored in a locker in Palo Alto.

Derek Randles and possibly members of his landscaping crew recovered the large body soon after the Kills. Supposedly, Randles and his crew and a few other researchers went down there soon after the Kills and recovered the body of the adult. The persons saying this are simply conjecturing because they say the body recovery story is not true  they think Randles and Justin’s behavior is suspicious.

They tell me, “It must be true. It has to be true.”

However at the moment, there is absolutely no good hard evidence that Randles and a team went down soon afterwards and recovered the large body.

Bobo’s statements that they have the bodies. Bobo has made a couple of suspicious statements that indicate that he feels that bodies were recovered from the Sierra Kills. In a public meeting for a Finding Bigfoot show, someone talked to Bobo about the Sierra Kills story.

“They didn’t recover the bodies then? Why not?” the person asked Bobo.

“No! No! No! You don’t understand!” Bobo whispered in a frantic tone, his eyes wide. “They’ve got the bodies!”

“You mean they recovered the bodies?” the man asked.

“Yes!” Bobo hissed with an alarmed look on his face.

Bobo insists that he never made this statement and has cursed me out for reporting this.

He and people around him say that the person misheard Bobo, and Bobo actually said something like, “They don’t have the bodies!”

However, the person who spoke to Bobo continues to insist on his version of the story.

In another case, on the Joe Rogan Show, Rogan asked Bobo if bodies were recovered from the Sierra Kills site. Bobo stared at the mike for a second and paused as if starting to say something and then stopping.

Bobo then said in a hushed tone, “Can I speak to you after the show?”

Rogan said, “Sure.” Then Bobo launched into the standard body recovery story.

Persons around Justin say that this statement by Bobo means absolutely nothing whatsoever.

Statements that the Sierra Kills was from the leg of the adult Bigfoot. On the surface, this appears very suspicious. Melba Ketchum told Richard Stubstad that the piece was from the thigh of the large male Bigfoot. Bobo also stated on the Conan O’Brien Show that the piece was from the leg of the male. There is no way anyone could know if it was from the thigh or leg of the Bigfoot unless someone carved it off the thigh or the leg and told people that’s where they got the meat.

Persons around Justin say that Melba simply theorized with no evidence that the piece came from the leg, and then the story got legs, and everyone started repeating it.

Body or bodies are in possession of Wally Hersom. Once again, this is just conjecture. People say that if the bodies exist, they are with Wally Hersom.

“They have to be with Wally. They can’t be with anyone else,” they tell me.

However, there is absolutely no good hard evidence that Wally Hersom has any Sierra Kills bodies or even that any bodies were retained at all.

If bodies exist, they would be released by now. People around Justin all say that if bodies existed, they would have been released by now. However, I have evidence that these people have excellent evidence to hide any bodies that may or may not exist. The reason for hiding them would be to protect the identities of those who took, who see their careers as researchers ruined if it comes out that they were involved in hiding bodies.

Some theorize that the bodies were going to be released with a fake story to deny the Sierra Kills story because it seems so ugly. Instead, the Bigfoots would have been recovered in a more friendly manner.

Also people state that Justin and those around him are not worried at all about Justin going to jail if bodies are released. However, I have information that some of the people around Justin are incredibly worried about just that. In fact, Derek Randles was extremely worried about that for sometime after the Kills.

After it came out that Bigfoots were part human on MtDNA, Randles told a source, “Those things are coming back human MtDNA. That means that Justin is guilty of murder if they prove he shot those things!” He reiterated that point numerous points. Randles now states that he never worried at any time that Justin might go to jail.

Whether Justin is himself, I do not know. He says he is not. If bodies are being hidden, it is for two reasons: to keep Justin out of jail and to protect identities of those who may have hidden bodies. However, as I noted above, there is not yet any good evidence that any bodies were retained from the Kills.

Justin would not have left the baby there at the scene. People who know Justin say that he never would have left the body of the baby at the scene because he is a taxidermist, and taxidermists always recover their special kills.

“There is no way on Earth a taxidermist would have left that body lying there,” I was told. “One thing you need to learn about taxidermists. Taxidermists are hoarders. They don’t leave great kills at the scene. Never.”

However, Justin says he did just that because he and the driver were so freaked out by the whole mess. They put the baby under a bush and drove away frantically, worried about California Department of Fish and Game (DFG) officials coming to get them.

Justin was worried because they had been drinking and shooting and were supposedly poaching. The argument is that Justin and the driver were drinking and hunting (illegal) and were poaching. For this reason, they were afraid of the DFG and this explains some of their behavior. Bobo said both of them were “pretty loaded on beer” after drinking beer much of the afternoon. However, Justin says he only had 1-2 beers. The poaching story keeps coming up for some reason and won’t go away. However, Justin insists that he was not poaching.

There is no evidence that Justin had more than a couple of beers or that he was poaching that day. However, he did shoot the Bigfoot from the truck, which is illegal.

True story of the Sierra Kills, like the JFK shooting, may never be resolved. Whether the standard version of the story is true or whether the other theories which folks around Justin deny are true will probably never be proven. The standard story will no doubt become received truth, and this is how history will be written. The other theories will simply be described as wild conspiracy theories with no evidence to back them, which is true (at least the no evidence part).

The bodies, if they exist, will probably never show up at this point. Too much damage has been done and the risk to various folks’ public images has been too great. If the bodies exist, they will probably be burned in a pile somewhere or dumped into the ocean. However, as noted, there is no evidence yet that the standard story is not true or that bodies were recovered or even retained.

Like the JFK shooting, there will be a “standard historical view” of the Sierra Kills case, and all other theories will be relegated to the conspiracy pile, and the debate between the two sides will probably go on for a long time unresolved.

We will probably never solve the question of whether the standard view is true, and there will probably always be folks who insist that bodies were recovered and kept after the incident. At this point, there is not a whole lot more to write about this story as it seems the Standard View is set in stone for now, and hard evidence, if it exists, will probably never be forthcoming. We may as well bury it and move on.

Why is Justin’s Sierra Kills Bigfoot steak testing as “bear?” Indeed the Kills steak has tested as “bear” in a few different lab results. Dr. Melba Ketchum’s detractors all say that this shows she is hoaxing or at the very least is incompetent. The hoax theory means that she knows it is a piece of bear, but she is pretending it is a piece of Bigfoot in order to hoax her scientific study.

However, there is a way to reconcile the two stories. We can simply say that there is a possibility that the body of the large one was scavenged by bears before the recovery, and this is why it is testing as bear. This is what a source told me, and I think it is a good theory for the two completely different results.

Strange Alberta Sasquatch photo may be the real deal. The very odd photo below was supposedly taken by a trapper in Alberta. It is said to show the back of a Bigfoot sitting down on the ground. It is not known why only one photo exists, and we do not have much of a back story on the photo. No one quite knows what is in the photo, whether it is one Bigfoot or two, or whether it is a bear instead. However, a friend of mine who works at a museum said it was a real Bigfoot, due to the hair.

I said, “But it looks so weird!”

He replied, “Well, Sasquatches are pretty weird animals!”

However, many insist that this is a photo of a bear. Make up your own mind.

Very weird photo of a possible Bigfoot in Alberta, Canada, shot from the back. It is apparently sitting on the ground.

Strange photos of Bigfoots shot by humans. All of these photos are said to originate long ago, mostly from the 1800′s. Two have been proven to be a fakes, but no one knows what the other one is.

The photo below showing the man standing next to the upside down dead Bigfoot has been proven to be a Photoshopped fake. This one originally surfaced on the Cryptomundo site.

Click to enlarge. Photoshopped fake of an old photo showing a hunter with a dead Bigfoot.

The very strange photo below surfaced somehow a little while ago and made it onto Loren Coleman’s fine Cryptomundo site. The writing on the back of the photo says the creature was killed by trappers in a certain location in coastal British Colombia. The date is given as a date in 1892. This photo is very odd and does not appear to be a fake. On the other hand, some say this is a common animal like a bobcat or a mountain lion. It surely does not look like one to me. One of the most fascinating cryptozoology photos out there!

This very odd photo below, now been shown to be a fake, just recently surfaced. It is certainly an excellent fake.

A very well done fake photo of a Bigfoot supposedly shot in the 19th Century.

Microbiologist backs Ketchum’s Bigfoot DNA paper. A microbiologist, Dr. Tyler Kohnjohn, has backed Ketchum’s DNA paper, saying that while she did not prove that Bigfoots exist, she did prove that there is “something strange in the woods of North America.”

Kohnjohn notes Ketchum’s data on hair morphology (excellent evidence in my view) and the fact that she found unique strands of NuDNA across multiple samples in favor of his view. He also explains why the paper was rejected and why she had to self-publish. Her first target, a forensics journal, rejected her paper because it was “too genetic and biological.” The biologist believes that the data points to one of two origins for Bigfoot: it is either a hybrid or a mutant.

Three cheers to Melba for this great letter from a PhD showing support for her paper!

Ketchum threatening to sue Bart Cutino, Wally Hersom and Sally Ramey. Why she is threatening to sue all these folks, I have no idea. I would not take on Wally though. He is big money. This is the dark side of Melba – her psychopathology, moral blindness or ruthlessness, however you will have it. I have been reporting on the Machiavellian nature of this piece of work for a long time now and was shredded to pieces for what I said about the poor delicate woman. Now her latest moral failures have come to light, and just about everyone thinks she is shady and sleazy if not an out and out crook. So I am vindicated once again.

In Ketchum’s favor, I would say that she has the same personality traits as such human sharks as Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Larry Ellison, Steven Ballmer and Andy Grove. This clowns are now icons in US ubercapitalist culture which worships those who pile up grotesque mounds of wealth that they have no Earthly use for.

The dark side is that I know exactly what all of these quasi-sociopaths were and are like in their corporate personas, and to put it nicely, they were and are all monsters. How did they behave? Very much like Ms. Ketchum. So you can see the fair lady has some fine or at least finely tailored company.

Anyway, it’s almost a requirement to be a sociopath to rise to the heights of US turbo-capitalist society, so doubt Melba has the right idea. But look at all the bodies in churning in the frothy wake of this female great white Leviathan.

Russian Yeti video backed by Dr. Igor Burtsev. A new Russian Yeti video has been released and Burtsev says it shows a female Bigfoot and her baby. Here is the video.

I have my doubts about this video. First of all, it was filmed by boys of about junior high age or so. Boys age 12-14 are evil all over the world at all times and in all cultures. I should know, as I was a little devil myself. All videos by boys around this age so far have been shown to be hoaxes. I am pretty much ruling this video out automatically due to the 8th grade morons who shot it. Furthermore, I think there is something wrong with the footprints, and it looks like they may have been faked.

On the other hand, the footprints do go in the straight line pattern of a Yeti. Are these punks smart enough to figure out the straight line pattern of the Yeti and make these huge footprints? That seems dubious, but kids this age of both sexes, in addition to being Satanic, are also starting to get very smart. Remember the top level Piaget milestone of abstract thinking appears in year 12 (leaving aside those who remain concretists their whole lives).

I suppose I am in the fence on this one.

Ketchum now extracting DNA from ancient skeletons. Melba is now working on DNA from some very weird ancient Indian skeletons from the Americas. They are working on teeth and bones with a new technique that one of the co-authors of her paper mastered. Richard Stubstad stole a couple of bones from the Lovelock Indian samples in Nevada and gave them to her, but Ketchum declined to test them, saying she thought they were Indians.

Russian Yeti scares skiers video. A fine breakdown of the video from the great Michael Merchant. This is an older video, and I understand that Erickson has included it in his documentary. I have always thought this was a real Yeti. It was shot near Kemerovo in the Altai, and that is where a large number of Yeti sightings come from.

Basswood Bigfoot video. This idiotic hoaxed video has been around for a long time now. The whole scene from the setup to the dialogue to the kids in the back just screams hoax. Too bad there were no hunters around to shoot the guy in the monkey suit. I am really getting sick and tired of these hoaxing scumbags. It’s not funny, jerks!

Scott Carpenter HD Dogman video. New video from my friend Scott Carpenter showing HD video of what he says is a Dogman. Looks more like a blobsquatch to me. Scott says a number of folks thought his video was amazing. I am not so sure. I do think that Scott is in onto something as his samples have been proven to be positive for Dogmen by Ketchum and were apparently influential in her reported view that Dogmen are different from Bigfoots.

Russian Yeti stealing food from a snowy porch video. This video was shot in the very far north of Russia in the Murmansk region. This is a very odd video, and I think it might be a real Yeti. The thing’s mouth moves! Mouths don’t move on masks. The Yeti creeps up on the people and peeks over a porch at them, freaks them out, and then runs away. Superb breakdown by the excellent Michael Merchant.

Myakka State Park Bigfoot video. An excellent video recently shot at Myakka State Park in Florida. A man was driving along at dusk when he noticed several cars pulled off to the side of the road.

He pulled over too and saw a bipedal figure off in the distance along with several deer behaving very strangely. The deer would be lying down and would jump up, run a bit and then like down in the grass again. They did this over and over. There was a large bipedal figure in the background that appeared to be stalking them. Apparently this was a Bigfoot that was stalking the deer for suppertime. The terrified deer were acting this way to fool the Bigfoot.

The filmer and his son walked towards the field, and the Bigfoot and the deer both remained in view for a while. When the shooter got closer, the excellent video was shot. The Bigfoot’s size has been calculated at 8 feet tall.

The large number of curious witnesses pulled over, some with binoculars and some with video cameras, testifies to the truth behind the sighting. Later, the man reported the sighting to park rangers who told him that there was no such thing as Bigfoot. The man went back later, received several tickets on his car and was told by rangers that the park was closed. The park was not closed, and it was later determined that the tickets were all fake. The shooter said that these strange behaviors indicated some sort of a coverup by park officials.

Monsanto Corporation: Portrait of Evil

I recently received this mail:

An agricultural giant called the Monsanto Company has risen to the top of the corporate food chains thanks to their genetically modified corn and soybean seeds, seeds bred to withstand and even produce their own herbicides and pesticides.

But in the decades since they’ve appeared on the scene, two more things have sprung up: a new crop of “superweeds” that have evolved to resist our chemicals, and root worms that have become insecticide-resistant “superworms,” both of which are set to swarm the Midwest in the coming year.

Rather than come clean, Monsanto has been covering their tracks, working to market their corn as fresh produce and spending millions to kill California’s Prop 37 requirement to label their corn and soybeans as genetically modified products.

The FDA still doesn’t require safety studies for Monsanto’s new strains, they’re designing food to produce dangerous chemicals, and these same chemicals have been breeding superworms that will devastate the landscape in the decades to come.

Don’t stay silent. Please, join us in calling on Monsanto to stop fighting Prop 37 in California, and spread this information on the danger of genetically engineered crops to as many friends as you can.

It’s time we knew what’s in the food we’re eating and the crops these companies are growing. Stop the superworm swarm: Join us in calling for greater transparency at the Monsanto Company!

Here is what is going on. Monsanto Corporation has been marketing herbicide and pesticide resistant genetically modified crops. The purpose of this is to allow you to plant more crops. However, the whole mess has backfired terribly. The more pesticide resistant crops they plant, but more bugs get resistant to pesticides, so you need to apply more and more pesticides to get the same effect.

In addition, planting herbicide resistant crops allows more use of herbicide. However, the herbicide resistant crops apparently hybridize their genes with weeds, creating “superweeds” that are resistant to herbicides. This means you need to apply more and more herbicides to kill the same weeds. Application of herbicides goes way up. As this sick corporation also makes herbicides, their herbicide sales go way up too. This is obviously insane to anyone with a brain.

Now, somehow genetically modified corn and soybean crops are also producing “superworms,” possibly nematodes that eat the roots of crops. The superworms have become resistant to pesticides, requiring greater and greater applications of pesticides in order to kill them. This seems to be definition of insanity.

Proposition 37 on the ballot in California was stupidly voted down by “liberal” California voters after Monsanto and other corporate maggots outspent the pro campaign for 20-30-1. The proposition sensibly called for labeling genetically modified foods. Then people could decide whether or not they wanted to buy them. Surveys show most people don’t want to buy the stuff.

The problem with Frankenfoods is that no one knows whether they are good for you or not. Many studies have been done indicating that Frankenfoods might actually be bad for both humans and pets and animals raised for food. No one knows the exact effects that these Frankenfoods have on our health, but caution is advised until all the data are in.

The government has been utterly corrupt in its approval of Frankenfoods. Over and over, the US government has ratified that these foods are safe despite countless studies casting doubt on that. University professors who did studies showing that Frankenfoods were bad for you have been bullied and threatened with their jobs. Monsanto and other giants have bought off and corrupted educational institutions such as universities and many governments. The whole thing sticks to high heaven.

Frankenfoods are stupid. If they don’t hurt our health or that of our food and pet animals, they are causing a nightmare in our agricultural fields. None of this makes any sense!

A Look at Ainu Genetics

Here.

This excellent piece on the genetics of the Ainu shows that they are in fact very different from Japanese, Koreans, Okinawans, Chinese and in fact all other East Asians. The best explanation for this is that the Australoid Ainu are the remains of the ancient Northeast Asians before they transitioned to Mongoloids 9,000 years ago.

Lonely leaf on a long branch. Look how remarkably different the Ainu are from all other East Asians.

They are now seen as Australoids and not as Caucasians as they were erroneously thought to be for a long time. The reason they were thought to be Caucasoids is because when you cross an Australoid with a Mongoloid, you often end up with a rather Caucasoid phenotype.

An old photo of a Hokkaido Ainu man, probably from the 19th Century. Note the Caucasoid phenotype. It was this resemblance that caused people to assign them to Caucasoids, but genetic tests later disproved this. Early anthropologists said the Ainu looked like “Norwegians”.

In fact, the Ainu may be the best remnants of the ancient East Asian race which may have had its beginnings around Lake Baikal 35,000 years ago. However, we know that the Ainu are related to the Jomonese, and the Jomonese can be traced all the way back to Thailand 16,000 YBP. Around that time, it is thought that the Ainu in the form of the Murrayan people journeyed to Australia, forming one of the main components of the Aborigine people. Around this same time, they may have gone to the Philippines, for their reports that one of the very ancient Filipino groups may have had an Ainu appearance.

The Ainu are the blue triangles trailing off the right. The Okinawans are the closest to the Ainu, and even they are not that close.

Interestingly, ancient Amerindians from 9-12,000 YBP have an Australoid appearance. The skulls from 9000 YBP appear Ainuid or Polynesian and the earlier skulls line up with Negritos, Papuans and Aborigines. This implies that the ancient Northeast Asians or Siberians from around the Altai region who immigrated to North America 9-12,000 YBP may have been an Ainuid people.

James Flynn on 2007 Blacks vs 1957 Whites

Repost from the old site.

Note: this post is both lengthy (64 pages) and highly complex. I have tried to make it as understandable as possible, as this blog is geared towards the general reader, but some stuff is just inherently complex. If you think you can’t handle it, you might just want to bail out now; life is difficult enough as it is without me donating a frustrating reading and thinking experience to you.

If you want to sally forth, anyway, go ahead. Meantime, here is a good introduction by James Flynn that is fairly brief and easy reading. In particular, he deals with Jason Malloy’s notion that the Flynn Effect is worthless and not a rise in intelligence since it lacks a g-factor load. If you enjoy that, come back here and spear some of the red meat:

In recent days a particularly forceful assault has been leveled against my post, The Skyrocketing Black IQ, by Jason Malloy on the Gene Expression (GNXP) blog. Please see both of the linked articles above to get a background on the highly complex issues involved in this debate.

I first saw Malloy in the comments on the Dienekes blog.

Malloy hides his de facto racist message with various pretensions and obfuscations, perhaps unconsciously.

An artist from Madison, Wisconsin, he fashions himself an autodidact scientist and mathematician, and in my opinion, he and his ilk are among the most dangerous de facto racists on the Internet, mostly because they seem so reasonable and non-racist about their message. We need to take on him and his ilk with everything we’ve got.

The Malloy line is that environment does absolutely nothing and genes are everything. His political views? He says he is a liberal Democrat. I don’t understand this at all, but I’ve seen stranger things. To me, the politics he says he has and the politics he promotes in his writings are contradictory, but whatever.

He is neither a scientist nor a mathematician, has no degrees in either field, and has no peer-reviewed publications, yet used to go around to science blogs lecturing actual scientists on how to do science.

Real researchers have a skeptical attitude. Molloy does not.

After making comments on my post on Dienekes’ superb blog, Malloy then reiterated his rejoinders in a new post on the ultra-racist, super-arrogant, disturbing, childish and downright embarrassing GNXP blog.

Malloy insists he is not a racist; he is just dispassionate scientist without a science degree who is looking for the cold, hard truth. After some emails with him, I do not think he is consciously racist, but he is pushing a de facto racist message whether he intends or not.

A lot of these guys fashion themselves as “scientific martyrs” – a modern day Galileo. If only people would realize the unpleasant truth: Blacks are stupid, permanently so, and apparently nothing short of gene therapy will change this sorry state. I’m sure just about every Black person around is dying to believe such wonderful things about themselves.

There is no scientific consensus for such a painful conclusion, so there is no reason for any non-racist or Black-friendly person to take that line. The words of Malloy and the many like him amount to psychological warfare against Blacks. At the end of the day, it is more than that: it is a declaration of de facto racial warfare on every Black person on Earth hiding behind the lab coat of science.

Malloy has some charming things to say about US Blacks in that widely-linked piece. He ridicules their mental skills by calling them “story-telling ability IQ”. Their ancestors in Africa have a high “mosquito-dodging IQ“.

He disagrees with my suggestion that the Whites of the Greatest Generation have lower IQ scores than Blacks, remarking that 1945 Whites could not possibly be “even less intelligent” than our considerably dense Black citizens.

Malloy also claims that modern science proves Blacks are much more inferior as workers than Whites, that this is a serious drag on any employer of Blacks, and that the reason for this is their incurable genetic stupidity. The implication is that Blacks simply should not be employed in any sane workplace.

A White friend of Blacks can make sometimes-painful impressionistic observations about Black culture, without being nasty and racist-sounding about it. See here for an example. Malloy and those like him forgo that route and just slam away at Blacks, then are stunned when people note the racism, intended or not, that shines through loud and clear.

GNXP is a Social Darwinist blog where conceited, know-it-all, rude, immature young upper class “intellectual elitist” manchildren make asses out of themselves, and in so doing, idiotically try to poison their future careers. The racism and general elitism, especially the leaderships of South Indian high caste elitists Newamul Khan (Razib) and Paul Wickre (Godless) of GNXP has been cataloged on the Net in many places.

What’s ticklish is that if US Blacks are idiots, what does that make Razib’s Desis, who are apparently even dumber than the Blacks he scorns? Don’t ask. Like so many insecure narcissists, Razib attacks those above him (in this case Blacks and Hispanics) while projecting his inferiority complex on them. It’s Psychology 101, and it would be funny if it was not so pathetic.

GNXP is a hangout where petulant, conceited, condescending, basically immature cranks can pitch their atavistic and nihilistic misanthropy couched as “science” while they cheer themselves on.

Malloy’s debating and authorial style is sledgehammer-like. I have yet to see him concede a point, and he typically refers to opponents as ignorant. Not a good way to win friends and influence people, and it won’t fly in any peer-reviewed journal.

Malloy’s counterattack has been widely linked around the blogosphere, usually in a laudatory way, and was even discussed in a widely-read NY Times article. Unfortunately, instead of being the tour de force it appears to be, this carefully-penned attack is a de facto racist screed.

The author takes as face value that US Whites have higher IQ’s than US Blacks, that this difference is largely genetic and therefore unalterable by any environmental means (except presumably gene therapy) for at least the next century, and that the Flynn Effect (see below) is not an intelligence gain at all and has no bearing on the Black-White (B-W) IQ gap.

Furthermore and most importantly, Malloy seems to take utter delight in all of the above positions.

Except for the italicized first one, none of these positions are supported by scientific consensus, to put it mildly. Even the first position is widely disputed, at least in the popular press most folks read. Even the US Federation of American Scientists disagrees, though I think they are wrong on that. Bottom line: this debate is very much an unsettled issue, for better or worse.

Anyone who has gleefully taken such an extreme position and argues forcefully against all contrary evidence should have their motives questioned. The truth is that anyone staking out such an intellectual space is arguing from a de facto racist point of view, and unfortunately, Malloy’s widely hailed post is a tour de force of de facto scientific racism.

The real danger in this stuff (there are many more like Malloy out there) is the fact that it is very well researched and written and sounds quite convincing and reasonable. A maniac in a sheet or giving a Seig Heil can be scornfully dismissed. The de facto racism of a mild-mannered, reasonable-sounding liberal is much more frightening in its allure and potential to intoxicate.

The reason this is a racist position is that there is as yet no scientific consensus whatsoever about the B-W IQ gap. All we know is that it exists. All else is pretty much up for grabs right now (for exhaustive overviews of the state of the enormously complex debate, see here and here).

Many libertarians and extreme rightwingers are now taking a hardline, “Blacks are stupid” line on the B-W gap. That few Western Blacks or Mulattos, Hispanics, Amerindians, Polynesians, Black Africans, Southeast Asians or Arabs, not to mention Leftists, Liberals, Centrists or even mainstream conservatives take this position is telling.

This hard line is both unwarranted and unproductive.

On the other hand, it is important to not go to the other extreme. Pointing out the verifiable fact that IQ scores are low in Africa or there is a Black-White gap in the US is not racism at all, yet Western society seems to treat it as if it is. The treatment of James Watson’s basically reasonable remarks (other than the remarks about Black employees) is a sad testament.

And those of us opposing scientific racism need to come up with better arguments than, “No such thing as race,” “No such thing as intelligence”, “No such thing as IQ”, “IQ does not measure intelligence”, and on and on.

For instance, IQ is positively correlated with glucose metabolism, frontal grey matter and cerebral blood flow in the brain. A brain that works more, faster or better is likely to use more glucose and blood and to have more tissue than one that does not. This would hardly be the case if IQ had nothing to do with intelligence.

My post cited a phenomenon of rising IQ’s in the West for 80 years called the Flynn Effect (FE – named after James Flynn, the man who discovered it)¹ and claimed that Blacks today have the same IQ score as Whites in 1957. 2007 Blacks also have IQ scores four points higher than Whites in 1945. If 1957 Whites were not stupid and did not have low IQ’s, neither are Blacks today stupid, nor do they have low IQ’s.

Here are Malloy’s complex charges:

He first asserts that there is something called g, or general intelligence factor (conceived by Charles Spearman)², and that this is pure, or real, intelligence. Everything not g is not real intelligence. Instead, it’s just garbage, test-taking practice, “bias”, cultural bias, statistical noise, nothing at all, this or that, or whatever.

Then he asserts that FE rises are not on g, twisting and misrepresenting (Apparently deliberately!) several statements by Flynn. Malloy says they are not on g because the rises are not something called factor-invariant. On the other hand, Malloy notes the fact that the B-W gap is factor invariant.

In fact, Malloy is conflating two different ways of measuring g-factor here, one elaborated by Arthur Jensen, and another way of measuring g, called factor invariance, used by a team out of the Netherlands in 2004 (N2004)³.

The Spearman-Jensen g -factor (SJGF) does indeed correlate with the FE as shown by Flynn in a counterargument to Jensen who said his g-factor did not correlate with FE (the highest FE rises have been on the most SJGF-loaded tests of them all – see Raven’s Progressive Matrices⁴).

However, there is no correlation between the FE and the N2004 factor-invariance method of measuring the g-factor (but see here ³ for quotes from the study that imply that the authors felt there was some correlation).

Also, note that the same authors issued a paper three years prior in which they called into question Jensen’s prize argument, that the B-W gap was due to g and that it was genetic and irremediable – i.e., Blacks are doomed to be stupid forever.⁵

It’s confusing, and overviews of several studies indicate that whether or not the FE is correlated with g is still very much up in the air, in part due to varying ways in measuring g. A cautious conclusion is that the FE shows a fluid-g gain but not a crystallized g gain.

Fluid intelligence is a rough measure of how fast and efficiently one’s brain works, and tends to decrease with age. Crystallized intelligence is more what you know, rather than how fast or well your brain works. It is also the sum total of life experience that we call “wisdom”. As one might expect, crystallized intelligence tends to increase with age, and even aged people can score very high.

The FE is not about knowing more stuff (young people today often seem strikingly ignorant to me, at the same time that I am shocked by how well their brains seem to work), nor is it about wisdom (see my post here that shows that Black pathology in the US increased wildly in the past 50 years while Black IQ’s went through the roof due to the FE⁶).

Malloy concludes that FE gains are not real intelligence gains since they are not g gains (but see above), and hence are worthless. He also states that 2007 Blacks do not have the same IQ scores as 1957 Whites, nor do their scores surpass 1945 Whites. Flynn disagrees.

There is indeed a paradox between the FE and the B-W gap. The B-W gap shows the stereotypical g-factor pattern – that is, the g-factor will measure the degree to which superior test-takers will tend to have a score lifted across all subtests, or across the board.

We could say that they seem smarter in an “across the board” way. It is true that the Blacks of today are not smarter “across the board” than the Whites of 50 years ago, but neither is the converse true, as Malloy implies.

Flynn and others offer some intriguing theories on the differences between g and the FE, and Flynn suggests that the g construct is not terribly important. Flynn suggests that the FE shows gains in intelligence within groups over time, like a movie. If you stop the movie at any time and take a snapshot, you see g. Start the movie again, and you see the FE.

Therefore, it seems wrong for Malloy to bash the FE on the basis that it is not on g, since the FE and g seem to be two entirely different things.

Put another way, we are comparing apples and oranges. It is true that apples do not correlate well with some hypothesized “orange factor”, but they need not and should not, and anyway, the fact that they do not does not imply that an apple is not fruit. It’s just that there is no reason to be comparing them.⁷.

Furthermore, Malloy and Jensen have problems when trying to say that the more a test taps g, the more genetic it is. B-W differences are highest on the subtests that are greatest in g, and the more a test taps g, the more genetic it is. How then to explain the massive FE, which is mostly on the most heavily g-loaded tests of all?

Malloy is also incorrect to imply that non-g FE gains are “hollow”, worthless, or not “real intelligence”. For instance, Malloy repeatedly states that IQ differences between ethnic groups (he often compares Blacks and Whites) are g-based, hence real, genetic and irremediable.

However, comparisons of Whites with some 3rd World groups show that the difference is on non-g. Hence, it follows that these 3rd World groups have the same intelligence as Whites.⁸.

A hallmark of the B-W gap genetic theorists rests on the scores of US Blacks, who strangely score 85, while African and Caribbean Blacks score 67 and 71 respectively. The hereditarian notion is that White admixture is what raises the US Black score, since African Blacks are pure Black and Caribbean Blacks are mostly Black. There are serious problems with this approach.⁹

Malloy is fond of several other claims.

Foremost, they believe that the B-W gap is wholly genetic, and hence cannot be remedied by any environmental factors or interventions. Blacks are hopelessly stupid forever, and the implication is that all money spent trying to give them a brain is down the drain.

They are doomed to wail, “If I Only Had a Brain“, in the wilderness forever, like the Strawman in the Wizard of Oz. The implication is that, as a hopeless race, Blacks must be cast off onto the proverbial ice floe as in the Eskimo custom, set free to fail and die as evolution deems fit.

In particular, Malloy attacks adoption studies, saying that adopting Blacks into White homes failed to raise their IQ’s. However, the evidence from adoption studies is far more complex than that, and many have shown gains for Blacks in these situations.¹⁰

Furthermore, even the model that holds that IQ scores within families are heavily genetic and owe almost nothing to shared home environment has been challenged, with radically different loadings for poor and high-income households on these factors.¹¹

An anomalous study in Germany (Eyferth 1961) based on the children of Black and White soldiers and White German women found no differences at all in IQ among the White and Mulatto children.

Note that many pushing a hardline “Blacks are forever stupid” line today are extreme rightwingers or libertarians. They are almost all Whites, and, in particular and creepily, Northern European Whites. There are a few high-caste South Indians and a Chinese here and there.

Jensen’s first article in 1969 stated that Blacks were dumb, that it was genetic and permanent and that Head Start should therefore be abandoned.

There is a reason for this political stance and there is a reason that almost everyone saying this far to the Right politically. There is an agenda being pushed here. If we can prove scientifically that Blacks are a hopelessly moronic race, and that their stupidity is embedded in their genome with no way of fixing the matter, we can cut off Blacks of any and all social programs designed to help them, educate them or make them smarter.

More savagely, the implication is that they are a useless evolutionary dead end that needs to be “phased out” in the frightening words of Richard Lynn. All money spent to help this dead-end hopeless race of idiots, either in the US or in Africa, is down the rathole. We should not give them medical care, income, rent, welfare, food stamps, disability, WIC or any other assistance or help in any way.

Africa, a continent reeling in disease and poverty, needs to be thrown out of the nest like a baby bird and told it is on their own, cutting off all food, medical and developmental aid. The result will be massive death and suffering in Africa. In the US, similar policies will be less severe but still frightening and tragic.

It is important to see the cruel and deadly racist motives behind scientific racism, even when promoted by consciously non-racist people. Even if their arguments are correct, the prescriptions most of them are pushing, if adopted, will mean chaos and widespread death and suffering for countless Blacks. It amounts to a declaration of war on Black people everywhere.

Scientific racism also claims that evidence shows that educating Blacks is useless, and most are ineducable. Many point to an set in stone “achievement gap” to show that Blacks are permanent dolts and need to be cut off. However, there is impressive evidence that the achievement gap is closing and that spending money on Black education does improve Black scores,

From Malloy’s piece:

An additional popular argument is that the Flynn Effect, the observed rise in IQ scores over time, is evidence that African-Americans or African countries will eventually reach parity with white norms. This typically includes the premise that white intelligence in the recent past was even lower than modern black intelligence. A typical example:

US Blacks, with an average IQ today of 85, have the same IQ as US Whites with an IQ of 100 in 1957. If 1957 US Whites were not stupid, then neither are US Blacks today. It’s time to shut up about the “low Black IQ”, since by any reasonable standard, it is not really low at all.

These arguments are wrong for the simple fact that the Flynn Effect is not a gain in real g factor intelligence, while the differences between nations and ethnic groups are differences in g factor intelligence. These findings led a 2004 team to state:

It appears therefore that the nature of the Flynn effect is qualitatively different from the nature of B-W [Black-White] differences in the United States… [so] implications of the Flynn effect for B-W differences appear small…

James Flynn, namesake of the secular increase, reiterates (DOC) these points:

Factor analysis is a way of measuring this tendency of some people to do better or worse than average across the board; and it yields something called g (a sort of super-correlation coefficient), which psychologists call the general intelligence factor…When you analyze IQ gains over time, you often find that they do not constitute enhancement of these latent traits — they do not seem to be general intelligence gains, or quantitative factor gains, or verbal factor gains (Wicherts et al, in press).

In the language of factor analysis, this means that IQ gains over time tend to display ‘measurement artifacts or cultural bias’. For a second time, we are driven to the conclusion that massive IQ gains are not intelligence gains or, indeed, any kind of significant cognitive gains (pp 27-28).

Flynn believes the secular increase represents important changes in specific narrow aspects of developed cognitive style, but not a rise in g intelligence. It is therefore incorrect that 1945 US whites were less intelligent than 2007 US blacks. The Flynn Effect has little apparent bearing on racial intelligence gaps.

A brief perusal of the Flynn links that Malloy provided above showed clearly that Malloy grotesquely took Flynn’s words out of context, possibly deliberately.

For one, Malloy implies that Flynn concedes that FE gains are not gains in any kind of real intelligence. For years Flynn did think that the gains were a practice effect or test artifact, but in recent years, he has changed his tune, and now really does believe that we are smarter in some ways. Even racist blogger Steve Sailer agrees.

Further, even scientific racists Steve Sailer, Richard Lynn and his co-author Tartu Vanhanen believe strongly in the FE, Lynn so much so that Sailer calls it the Lynn-Flynn Effect.

Malloy has been staking out this extreme scientific racist stance for years now – see here from 2003. Ole Eichhorn, a colleague of his at GNXP, does not share his views and believes strongly in the FE. Malloy at times parrots scientific racist hardliners Jensen and Charles Murray. Murray is a libertarian and Jensen is apparently an extreme rightwinger.

In a recent paper with fellow scientific racist Rushton, Jensen laid out his position: that an acceptance that Blacks are genetically less intelligent than Whites should logically lead to an end to anti-discrimination lawsuits. The burden of proof in such cases would fall on the plaintiff in proving that the employer was motivated by bias and not by Blacks’ scientifically proven genetic intelligence deficits.

This is the brave new world that the scientific racists have in store for us: where Blacks are forever resigned to much lower socioeconomic, health and educational status, with no way for them to equalize things even a bit. It’s this, and not “search for truth”, “science” or Galileo-martyr complexes, that motivates scientific racism, and it is for this reason that we must fight it with all we have.

I sent Flynn an email linking both my post and Malloy’s counterattack. He emailed me back¹³. Flynn made three rather confusing points, quoting from a book of his now on sale at Amazon:

• The FE gains are on g but at the same time they are not on g.
• The FE gains are real intelligence gains in spite of the fact that they are not factor-invariant.
• Flynn agreed with me that Blacks today have the same IQ’s of Whites of 1957, but he made a confusing statement that seemed to imply that Blacks may continue to gain on Whites, and possibly even move to close the gap.

Here is the statement for you to play around with: Blacks do match the whites of 50 years ago but that does not settle the debate. It can be argued that they are the beneficiaries of the effects of modernity over that time and this could be either more or less than the environmental disadvantage they suffer at any given time.

According to this mail, Flynn disagrees with Malloy’s assertions above and also disagrees with all views that Malloy has attributed to Flynn above. However, in a recent email, Malloy agreed that he and Flynn disagree about the meaning of the FE.

There are a lot of confusing terms in here – g factor, factor invariance, etc. See the footnotes and click some of the links to try to understand it better, but this is stuff is not easy going.

Notes

1. The FE in the US shows a 18 point gain over the 70 years from 1947-2002. In my opinion, Blacks have scored higher, reaching 23.5 points.

There are many possible causes of the FE in modern life. According to Flynn in his new book, they may be: Increased demands from more professional, technical, and managerial jobs; increased leisure time; changing cognitive demands of personal interactions; or changing attitudes toward intellectual activity. Nutrition, better schooling, video games, television, computers, cell phones and the increased complexity of modern life are all thought to play a role.

2. The g-factor is best thought of as a correlation coefficient that shows the extent to which superior test takers, if they score better on one test, tend to score better on other tests across the board. It indicates a brain that works “better all across the board” than others with lower g.

A group higher in g than another group will tend to score better than the lower group in an across the board kind of way. Like IQ, g also correlates with quite a few correlates of intelligence such as increased grey matter in the brain.

Jensen’s original extension of Spearman’s g involved the concept that that g-factor is what he called “Level 2 conceptual learning” – the ability to solve problems = conceptual learning = synthesizing ability. Non-g factor was conceived by Jensen as a “Level 1″ type of learning, and is roughly the retention of input and rote memorization of simple facts and skills = associative learning = memorizing ability.

Most IQ subtests would appear to measure Level 2 conceptual learning quite well. Actually, by Jensen’s own reasoning, he felt that the B-W gap was only 60% in g.

3. Raven’s, the most g-loaded test ever made, shows the largest FE of any test. The test was in fact specifically designed to measure g-factor intelligence only. The test has more predictive validity than any other test used in occupational groups and especially predicts mobility in jobs. It measures ability to “make sense out of the buzzing confusion of life”.

Scientific racist Philippe Rushton shows that Raven’s has no cultural bias whatsoever.

4. This extremely complex paper notes: gains cannot be explained solely by increases at the level of the latent variables (common factors), which IQ tests purport to measure.

In other words, according to this study, some of the:

…inter-generational difference in IQ is attributable to bias or other artifacts, and not real gains in general intelligence or higher-order ability factors…A cautionary conclusion would be that part of the gains (excluding the sub-tests Similarities and Comprehension) could be explained by genuine increases in intelligence.

Whereas implications of the FE for B–W differences appear small, the implications for intelligence testing, in general, are large.

As we can see, even Malloy, Jensen and Rushton’s favorite study indicates that part of FE gains could be on their version of g.

5. Dolan and Hamaker 2001 reanalyzed the data from several earlier studies and concluded that Spearman’s hypothesis is not an “empirically established fact” (i.e., that Black-White IQ differences may be due to differences in common factors other than g) due to insufficient power in the data to choose between alternative models.

The paper said:

This leaves the validity of Spearman’s hypothesis, considered a central justification for the genetic explanation, an unresolved question…

However, they did confirm that the Black-White IQ gap is not due to measurement artifacts, and is instead due to some measured factor that varies both within and between groups. These same people stated that the g factor did not explain the B-W gap as it was not explanatorily accurate.

The paper reanalyzed the data from several previous studies (Jensen and Reynolds 1982; Naglieri and Jensen 1987) that used the statistical method invented by Jensen (the method of correlated vectors – g factor) with a more recent and improved method (multigroup confirmatory factor analysis).

Quote:

On the basis of the present, as well as other results (Dolan 2000), we are convinced that the Spearman correlation cannot be used to demonstrate the importance of g in b-w differences with any confidence…

It is possible that the analysis of all available data sets (perhaps using an appropriate meta-analytic procedure) will demonstrate that a model incorporating the weak version of Spearman’s hypothesis provides the best description of the data. However, until this work is undertaken, we cannot accept Spearman’s hypothesis as an “empirically established fact [139]

6. There is quite a bit of existing evidence suggests that FE gains across subtests may indeed be positively correlated with g loading. See Colom 2001 for good correlations between FE and g, and Juan-Espinosa 2000 for much stronger correlations between g loadings and FE gains.

Jensen’s The g Factor, pp. 320–21, reviews a number of studies of the relation between FE subtest gains and g loadings, all of which show weak positive correlations. However, Rushton 1999 finds that a measure of g developed on the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children (WISC) has loadings that are negatively correlated with FE subtest gains in several countries.

Yet this was challenged in Flynn’s new book, Extending Intelligence: Enhancement and New Constructs, where he makes the argument that FE gains are greatest on tests of fluid g rather than crystallized g. Flynn finds a positive (though statistically insignificant) correlation between a measure of fluid g he develops and FE gains in the data used by Rushton.

Two tests in Estonia did not find a correlation between g loadings and FE gains on those tests, but these are achievement tests with a strong crystallized bias. See Must 2001 and Must 2003.

7. For an introduction to Flynn’s new book in which he explores the various paradoxes of the FE, see Amazon’s page on the book. For a much more complex take on how FE gains can be on g but not on g, see this paper.

From the paper:

Numerous studies indicate that measures of intelligence reliably produce a latent general factor, referred to as g, which is associated with real world competence and is highly heritable (see Jensen 1998).

However, analysis of measurement invariance between normative cohorts in gains on five standardized measures of intelligence indicated that IQ gains cannot be attributed to change in a general latent factor but primarily reflect systematic variation in specific aspects of cognition leading to bias between cohorts on a number of subtests of intelligence measures (Wicherts et al., in press).

Something in the experience of successive generations is bringing about changes in aspects of cognitive functioning that are associated with g within but not between cohorts.

See also Flynn’s superb but hard to follow lecture (based on his new book) at the Psychometrics Centre in Britain where he made fascinating points and intriguing allegories while offering fascinating examples. From the lecture:

(1) The factor analysis paradox: Factor analysis shows a first principal component called g or general intelligence that seems to bind performance on the various WISC subtests together. However, IQ gains over time show score gains on the WISC subtests occurring independently of one another.

How can intelligence be both one and many?…

(1) The WISC subtests measure a variety of cognitive skills that are functionally independent and responsive to changes in social priorities over time. The inter-correlations that engender g are binding only when comparing individuals within a static social context…someone who tended to be superior on any one would tend to be above average on all.

Let us assume that the 100 meters, the hurdles, and the high jump all had large and similar g loadings as they almost certainly would. A sprinter needs upper body strength as well as speed, a hurdler needs speed and spring, a high jumper needs spring and timing.

I have no doubt that a good athlete would best the average athlete handily on all three at a given place and time. However, over time, social priorities change. People become obsessed with the 100 meters as the most spectacular spectator event (the world’s fastest human). Young people find success in this event a secondary sex characteristic of great allure.

Over 30 years, performance escalates by a full SD in the 100 meters, by half an SD in the hurdles, and not at all in the high jump. Although average performance has risen “eccentrically” on various events, the following is still true: superior performers still do better than average on all 10 events and are about the same degree above average on various events as they were 30 years before.

Arithmetic, Information, Vocabulary, and Similarities all load heavily on g(IQ) and on a shared verbal factor. Despite this, Americans gained 24 points on Similarities between 1947 and 2002 (1.6 SD’s), 4 points on Vocabulary, and only 2 points on Arithmetic and Information…

To sum up. Factor analysis and g(IQ) describes a static situation where individual differences are compared and social change is frozen. The degree to which superior people are above average on the various subtests sets their respective g loadings.

IQ gains over time describe a dynamic situation in which social priorities shift in a multitude of ways. No better math teaching, more leisure but with the extra leisure devoted to visual rather then verbal pursuits, the spread of the scientific ethos, and a host of other things all occurring together.

The average on Similarities rises but the average on Arithmetic and Vocabulary does not. How odd it would be if social trends mimicked factor loadings in determining what real world cognitive skills progress and which mark time! If they did so, IQ gains would appear factor invariant, but that would be purely accidental (Wicherts et al 2004).

Although radically different trends alter average performances on various WISC subtests between Time 1 and Time 2, note that this leaves a certain stability untouched. Superior performers are much the same degree above average on each and every subtest at both Time 2 and Time 1. Therefore, much the same g will emerge.

Our first paradox is resolved. At any particular time, factor analysis will extract g(IQ) — and intelligence appears unitary. Over time, real-world cognitive skills assert their functional autonomy and swim freely of g — and intelligence appears multiple. If you want to see g, stop the film and extract a snap shot; you will not see it while the film is running. Society does not do factor analysis.

It is a juggernaut that flattens factor loadings and imposes its own priorities. Similarities requires you to solve problems on the spot without a previously learned method. The Performance subtests… require … arranging pictures to tell a story.

General information, math and vocabulary show only small gains on most tests, though the Dutch scored high gains. There have also been IQ identical rises in NAEP tests. Children are learning to read at an earlier age, but they are no better at reading adult literature than before. Basic math skills have shown impressive gains, but mathematical reasoning has been flat.

That means people are no better at geometry and algebra than they were in the past. Ability to solve problems without a previously learned method will be good for managerial, professional, and technical jobs to fill — jobs that often require decisions without the guidance of set rules. We are better at solving novel problems verbally, visually and abstractly.

Previous generations were more rule-governed and less likely to “think outside the box”. Previously, people engaged in pre-scientific, more concrete operational thinking. Now, they are post-scientific and more abstract.

What do dogs and rabbits have in common? They are not retarded, they use syllogistic logic, but they will appear retarded on Similarities. There is more lateral thinking now, and the human mind has been liberated – the liberation of reason from the concrete. There has been the spread of the language and categories of science and on the spot problem solving has been enhanced.

So, Flynn shows that IQ gains are real and that they are the result of environmental progress. The artifact, test taking or bias options cannot be supported by evidence. Test sophistication shows a particular pattern that is not present in the Flynn Effect. Flynn also resolutely shoots down cultural bias.

A series of studies were undertaken by a Russian researcher in first decade of the 20th Century amongst Siberian peasants. He was studying their cognitive styles. Looking at their test answers today, we can see how they were not retarded at all, but would have scored retarded on some of our modern IQ tests.

From the lecture:

Q: All bears are white where there is always snow; in Novaya Zemlya there is always snow; what color are the bears there?

A: I have seen only black bears and I do not talk of what I have not seen.

Q: But what do my words imply?

A: If a person has not been there he can not say anything on the basis of words. If a man was 60 or 80 and had seen a white bear there and told me about it, he could be believed.

This indicates that the Siberian peasant uses syllogistic or concrete logic that was useful for him at the time. As you can see, the questioner tries to get the peasant to think scientifically, but the man stubbornly refuses to, possibly because he is not able to. Not because he is stupid, but because he has never learned how to think this way.

If you tried to explain to the peasant the more abstract and rational way of looking at the problem, he might have argued with you, but more likely he would give you a look that says, “Why do you think that is important?” There was little use in his world for abstract thinking.

Again, in the lecture, Flynn shows that if you asked a boy in 1920 what dogs and rabbits have in common, he would probably have given you an “odd” answer like, “You use a dog to hunt a rabbit.” Nowadays, if someone gave an answer like that, people would crinkle their eyes, look puzzled and say that that answer was “Idiotic!”.

This means it shows contempt for scientific norms, not that it is incorrect – one may indeed use a dog to hunt a rabbit – but modern science does not deem that relationship the most important one between the two animals.

Even a youngster in the ghetto with poor grades nowadays may be able to give the answer we deem “correct”: “Both dogs and rabbits are mammals”. The boy in 1920 is not slow or retarded, he is just using concrete and pre-scientific thinking. The boy in the ghetto, despite his gangsta language and clothing, may at least be able to think like a scientist.

Flynn also shows how Rosenau and Fagan (1997) compare the 1918 debate on women’s suffrage with recent debates on women’s rights and make an excellent case that the latter shows less contempt for logic and relevance. This shows that we are becoming less illogical and irrelevant in our thinking over time.

That our ancestors were illogical or irrelevant in some aspects of their thinking does not mean they were retarded or slow. Illogicality and irrelevance were useful to them in some ways as argumentation styles and in making sense of the world in pleasing and comforting ways; they were culturally sanctioned and incurred little to no penalties.

The Darrow Trial in the 1920′s is another example. They were not retarded or stupid, just unscientific.

8. For instance, B-W IQ differences in South Africa are not factor invariant, so according to Malloy, these differences are not real at all. Malloy’s position would have to be that there are no differences between White and Black IQ’s in South Africa, despite a White score of 100 and a Black score of 67. Is this a position that he is willing to take?

Furthermore, in his book, The g Factor , Jensen himself says that White – South Indian IQ differences are not based on g. Therefore, according to both Jensen and Malloy, Whites and South Asians score the same on IQ tests, despite a White score of 100 and a South Indian score of 81. Is Malloy willing to concede this?

9. Clearly, US B-W differences compared to US White – African differences cannot be explained by the European admixture in the blood of US Blacks. US Blacks are 17.5% White on average. Adding 17.5% White (IQ 100) to the African IQ of 67 gives us 67 + 6 = 73. Instead of the expected 73, we get 85. Clearly, something other than genes is raising US Black IQ.

In addition, numerous studies have been done to try to determine whether or not White admixture in Blacks is correlated with IQ. These studies have found nothing – there is little or no correlation between the degree of White blood in a Black and their IQ score.

Since the US B-W gap is said to be based on g and purely biological, yet there is no difference in Black IQ based on White ancestry level, this takes apart Jensen’s notion that both the B-W difference and g are biological.

10. For instance, Tizard 1974 showed that the Black orphans raised in an orphanage were smarter than the White orphans. Moore 1974 and Willerman 1986 found that Blacks adoptees raised by White mothers had higher IQ’s than adoptees raised by Black mothers.

Scarr and Weinberg (1976, 1983) in a study of Blacks adopted into upper-income White homes in Minnesota, showed that Black children benefited by adoption into high-income white families. Black children had IQ’s of 94 (5 pt gain) and mixed-race (mulatto) adoptees had IQ’s of 99.

The effect wore off by late adolescence and adulthood, but this just shows that home environment only benefits Black children, and the effect wears off by late adolescence to adulthood. But late adolescent to adult Blacks may need a new sort of stimulating environment to maintain their gains from childhood.

Most adoption studies, as noted by the Minnesota trans-racial study above, show gains only in childhood, with gains wearing off by adulthood. However, one study did find lasting gains into adulthood. This effect lasted into adulthood.

11. For instance, from Turkheimer 2003: The models suggest that in impoverished families, 60% of the variance in IQ is accounted for by the shared environment, and the contribution of genes is close to zero; in affluent families, the result is almost exactly the reverse.

12. Huang and Hauser 2000 show that, controlling for social background, Blacks made significant gains in closing the Black-White achievement gap from 1974-1998. Since then, they have begun to lose ground as rightwing policies to cut back on education funds for Blacks have taken hold, harming Blacks. Boozer and Cacciola 2001 show that reducing class size caused an impressive increase in achievement test gains.

13. It is normally a violation of netiquette to print private emails without someone’s permission, but the folks at GNXP demanded that I post Flynn’s letter in its entirely. I do not reprint the whole letter, but I do reprint the parts that are important.

I bold the parts of his letter that are at least a bit confusing to me. A characteristic of the narcissistic young men on GNXP is that they never admit that there is anything they don’t understand, and they never concede a point. Being a grownup and all, I do both.

You raise three questions and my current book (What is intelligence?) illuminates all three. You can get it from amazon.com for $14.96 or probably from a Border’s bookstore:

(1) IQ gains are significant despite not being factor invariant – see chapter 2;

(2) Black gains on white are gains in g even though they are not g gains – sounds odd but true – see pp 60-63;

(3) Blacks do match the whites of 50 years ago but that does not settle the debate. It can be argued that they are the beneficiaries of the effects of modernity over that time and this could be either more or less than the environmental disadvantage they suffer at any given time.

References

Blair, C., Gamson, D. Thorne, S., Baker, D. “Rising mean IQ: Cognitive demand of mathematics education for young children, population exposure to formal schooling, and the neurobiology of the prefrontal cortex”, Intelligence 33 (2005) 93–106.

Boozer, Michael A. and Cacciola, Stephen E. “Inside the ‘Black Box’ of Project STAR: Estimation of Peer Effects Using Experimental Data,” Discussion Paper 832 (Economic Growth Center, Yale University, 2001).

Colom, R., Juan-Espinosa, M., and García, L.F. “The Secular Increase in Test Scores Is a ‘Jensen effect,’” Personality and Individual Differences 30 (2001): 553–58.

Klaus Eyferth “Leistungen verschiedener Gruppen von Besatzungskindern in Hamburg-Wechsler Intelligenztest fur Kinder (HAWIK),” Archiv fur die gesamte Psychologie 113 (1961): 222–41.

Flynn, James R. “The History of the American Mind in the 20th Century: A Scenario to Explain IQ Gains over Time and a Case for the Irrelevance of g,” in Extending Intelligence: Enhancement and New Constructs, edited by P. C. Kyllonon, R. D. Roberts, and L. Stankov (Hillsdale, N.J.: Erlbaum, forthcoming).

Huang, Min-Hsiung and Hauser, Robert M. (2000) Convergent Trends in Black-White Test-Score Differentials in the U.S.: A Correction of Richard Lynn

Jensen, Arthur The g Factor: The Science of Mental Abilities, pp. 320–21. (Westport, CN: Praeger, 1998)

Juan-Espinosa, Manuel and others “Individual Differences in Large-Spaces Orientation: g and Beyond?” Personality and Individual Differences 29 (2000): 85–98.

Moore, Elsie G. J. “Family Socialization and the IQ Test Performance of Traditionally and Transracially Adopted Black Children,” Developmental Psychology 22 (1986): 317–26.

Must, O., Must, A.. and Raudik, V. “The Flynn Effect for Gains in Literacy Found in Estonia Is Not a Jensen Effect,” Personality and Individual Differences 33 (2001).

Must, Must, and Raudik, V. “The Secular Rise in IQs: In Estonia the Flynn Effect Is Not a Jensen Effect,” Intelligence 31 (2003): 461–71.

“Myth: Social intervention cannot raise IQ;”, in “Intelligence Quotient”, chapter in The Encyclopedia of Adoption.

Rushton, J. Philippe “Secular Gains in IQ Not Related to the g Factor and Inbreeding Depression—unlike Black-White Differences: A Reply to Flynn,” Personality and Individual Differences 26 (1999): 381–89.

Scarr, S. and Weinberg, R. A. “IQ Test Performance of Black Children Adopted by White Families,” American Psychologist 31 (1976): 726–39.

Scarr, S. and Weinberg, R. A. “The Minnesota Adoption Studies: Genetic Differences and Malleability,” Child Development 54 (1983): 260–67 .

Tizard, Barbara “IQ and Race,” Nature 247, no. 5439 (February 1, 1974).

Turkheimer, E., Haley, A., Waldron, M., D’Onofrio, B. and Gottesman, I. I. “Socioeconomic status modifies heritability of IQ in young children”, Psychological Science 14 (6) (2003), 623–628.

Wicherts, J. M., Dolan, C. V., Hessen, D. J., Oosterveld, P., Baal, G. C. M., van Boomsma, D. I., & Span, M. M. “Are intelligence tests measurement invariant over time? Investigating the nature of the Flynn effect.” Intelligence 32 (2004), 509–537 .

Willerman, Lee and others, “Intellectual Development of Children from Interracial Matings: Performance in Infancy and at 4 Years,” Behavioral Genetics 4 (1974): 84–88.

Bigfoot News March 15, 2013

Exciting news on Musky Allen’s visit to view Rick Dyer’s Bigfoot body. I am now 100% sure that Dyer has a dead Bigfoot that he shot and killed last September in San Antonio, Texas.

One reason is that I just learned some more about Allen’s visit to Las Vegas when he viewed the body. One thing I was uncertain about was whether or not Dyer was fooling Allen with a clever Hollywood movie prop. I was not sure whether Allen could tell the difference between a movie prop and a real dead body.

For the record, I know both Allen and the Facebook/Find Bigfoot guys, and neither of them is on any kind of a hoax. However, it remains possible that they are being hoaxed by Dyer, himself a notorious hoaxer.

Yet I just learned that when Allen went to see the body at Las Vegas, he was taken to an official US government facility. It was also a location with a very high degree of security. This was one of the main reasons why Allen had to sign so many documents before he viewed the body – because it is being held at that secure facility. There is absolutely no way that this government locale with all that security would be in on any kind of a hoax. It is not possible.

I have also learned that when Allen was viewing the body, there was another man present who was looking to buy Dyer’s body. This man had a physician there with him to figure out if it was a Hollywood prop or a real dead creature. Within two minutes, the physician determined that this was an actual dead creature of some sort.

An artist’s rendition of Rick Dyer shooting a Bigfoot in San Antonio, Texas at 2:30 AM on September 6, 2012.

Did the FB/FB guys view Dyer’s body? I have not been able to determine whether or not they were able to view the body, but it is possible that they did see it. They only issued a standard no comment disclaimer when I asked them.

Derek Randles may not see Dyer’s body. My understanding is that Dyer is not going to let anymore people see the body until the reveal, so I doubt if Randles is going to see the body.

Minnow Films will issue a statement on the movie Shooting Bigfoot next week. The statement will be issued by none other than Morgan Matthews himself. Minnow stated that it is not normal protocol for Matthews to issue a statement about one of his films, but this film contains something of particular interest, necessitating the statement by the director. We can only imagine what this statement will say.

Shooting Bigfoot will show soon on BBC Storyville. According to a tweet on BBC Storyville’s Twitter feed, the movie will show soon, but they do not have an official date yet.

New interview with me up. I was interviewed on the Mind Cemetery show on the Paranormal Network Internet radio station. The interview was also broadcast on a radio station in New Orleans, but I haven’t been able to find out its radio handle. It seems to be an obscure station. Mind Cemetery is a UFO network, but the interview was only about Bigfoot. The talk ranged for two hours. The host was an immensely personable fellow, and I enjoyed the discussion very much.

New version of the Tent Video is out with full audio. FB/FB has released a new version of Dyer’s Tent Video with the full audio. Some of the audio was edited out of the version released previously. The part that was edited out has the BBC crew whispering to Dyer, “Rick! Rick!” They are alerting him that a Bigfoot is outside his tent eating the ribs. Of course, Rick was already up and fumbling around for his rifle by that time. He then ran out with his rifle, but he froze up and could not shoot the Bigfoot. Nevertheless, a three minute segment of the Bigfoot eating the ribs was shot by the film crew. I knew about this missing audio segment for a long time, but I was not allowed to report on it.

Loren Coleman has left Cryptomundo. There has been some huge fallout between Coleman and Craig Woolheater, the result of which is that Coleman has left Cryptomundo to found a new website. What is funny is that I always thought that Cryptomundo was Coleman’s site. Actually, it is Woolheater’s site. Coleman is doing a good job on his new site, in fact, it is better than the old site!

Coleman is a very educated man. He has an MA in psychology and has worked as some sort of a counselor before. He has also penned some excellent tracts on social psychology. He seems to be particularly knowledgeable about the psychology of mass shooters, about which he has written lately. Coleman is no dummy!

Am I in on the Dyer hoax? Most people insist that Rick Dyer is hoaxing this latest body claim. I have been warned many times not to support him because people will say that I am in on the hoax. The problem with that is that Dyer and I have no relationship whatsoever. In fact, at the moment, we apparently hate each other. Well, at least I hate him and will until he stops libeling me. He doesn’t seem too fond of me, otherwise he would not attack me so much on his site. He is also savagely attacking some very good friends of mine, and I am not too happy about that.

Obviously, in many ways, Rick Dyer is simply not an honorable man. His drunken, obscenity- and threat-filled video tirades are embarrassing. He viciously goes after any and all perceived enemies in a manner that can only be called pathological. He has hoaxed the community repeatedly, and he made $50,000 off the 2008 hoax. He continued to hoax the community up until early this year. He apparently defrauded people who went on his Bigfoot hunts by having a friend run by in a Bigfoot costume. Rick laughed while discussing this, chortling about how he was fleecing the rubes. At his base essence, Rick Dyer is simply a long-term con artist.

He has been arrested a couple of times recently for some disturbing things. Charges were dropped in both cases – in one case when he returned stolen property and in another case when he agreed to not beat up his wife. Although charges were dropped, he appears to have been guilty of these offenses.

As you can see, this guy has a list of transgressions longer than the phone book. Even if he were friendly to me, it might take a bit of an effort to like such a willful and amoral flim flam man. On top of that, I am on his enemies’ list for some reason.

As you can see, even if Rick were hoaxing, I could not profit from it in any way because Rick and I have no relationship. I actually would not mind being on friendly terms with the fellow, but that is probably not going to happen due to my role as a truth-seeking investigative reporter. What is sad is that at this point, it is probably better for Rick and I to be at odds with each other as opposed to being on amicable terms. Because as soon as Rick and I get on friendly terms, people will say that I am “in on the hoax.” Now is that pitiful or what? When it’s better to be enemies than to be friends with someone for pragmatic reasons, it’s a sorry day.

Dyer does have a good side. It is said that he donated some of his recent proceeds to charity. What I think he really did was he bought off or paid off some of the homeless people where he shot the Bigfoot in San Antonio, possibly as hush money. Or maybe he just felt sorry for homeless people having been around them filming for a couple of weeks.

Anyway, narcissists often like to position themselves as major do-gooders out to benefit mankind. They set up charitable or self help groups or foundations, declare themselves dedicated to a life of helping others, make a lot of money and give it away to “inferior, loser” relatives as a way to be superior, make discoveries that save lives and help others. The life-saver, do-gooder, charity guy image feeds into their narcissism about what a great person they are. This is not really a bad aspect of narcissism; in fact, it is one of the good aspects. The take-home point is that they are helping others not out of altruism but in order to feel better about themselves, but maybe at the end of the day, that is a mere quibble .

Dyer may have a good relationship with his wife most of the time and may be good to his kids. Musky Allen met him and said he can be a charming fellow, a nice guy. But these types can often be charming and pleasant when they want to be.

I also feel that Dyer may be motivated by redemption in this latest case. He wants to be redeemed for the humiliation he received when he was  excoriated as a hoaxer and reviled by much of humanity. Why would such a nasty fellow want redemption for his sins? Bad people don’t care if they are bad. Bad people don’t feel bad; they don’t feel guilty. Rick feels bad and feels guilty on some level, hence the undoing.

How can a bad person want redemption? Answer: Rick Dyer isn’t all bad. Or as my mother would say, “Well,” and then a thoughtful pause. “People are complicated.”

Black and white is for children and lazy thinkers. It’s an exaggeration to say everything’s a grey area, but that’s more a sliding towards truth than childish Manichean splitting.

Dr. Melba Ketchum Bigfoot DNA study reached strange conclusions. Ketchum says that Bigfoots are closer to lemurs than to anything else. Sorry but that makes no sense at all. None, zero, zip. Back to the drawing board, Melba.

No contamination in Ketchum DNA findings. There is some little-known evidence that there is no contamination in her samples: Ketchum tested the Bigfoot nuDNA for several human genes, the names of which you can find in the manuscript. MC1R (human/Neanderthal red-hair color gene) showed up in the Bigfoot nuDNA as did the human antigen gene TAP1 (most of the time) and the jaw muscle gene MYH16 (which when present showed only a human profile rather than an ape one).

Not discussed in the manuscript are the tests Ketchum did for the TYR gene, which is associated with skin pigmentation, and the HAR1 gene, which is a “human accelerated region” associated with human neurological development. The human skin color gene TYR and human brain gene HAR1 were not found in Bigfoot nuDNA. Now that in and of itself is very interesting.

If the samples really were just bear or coyote or bobcat smeared with human contamination, all of the human genes should show up all over the place. The peer-reviewers for Ketchum’s manuscript only wanted positive, not negative, results included for gene tests, so the TYR and HAR1 data are not discussed in the manuscript. However, you can see the remnants of it in the Supplemental Data 12 appendix. The bottom line is the Bigfoot nuDNA is missing some important human genes that should be there if the nuDNA were in fact simply contaminated with human DNA.

Furthermore, if the samples were simply bears, coyotes or whatever with no human contamination present, the human genes listed above would not be there at all.

The conclusion is that the “contamination” meme bandied about is simply a red herring. Ketchum’s DNA results, whatever they were and whatever they mean, were simply not a result of contamination in any way, shape or form. Critics really need to get over the contamination BS.

Possible explanation for anomalous Ketchum and Smeja/Cutino results for the Bigfoot steak from the Sierra Kills. The results indicate that the submissions were from two different objects, not a single object. Cutino/Smeja’s results ended up with MtDNA haplotypes A and T2, and Ketchum’s MtDNA results indicate haplotype H1A for Sample 26 (the Sierra Kills Bigfoot steak). Apparently these were two completely different objects being tested. I have no explanation for the anomalous results or why there were two objects when there was said to be only two pieces of a single object.

Greenbriar Sporting Club Bigfoot trailcam photo. This photo was taken by a trailcam at the Greenbriar Sporting Club, which I believe is in West Virginia. They didn’t recover the photo until weeks later, and by that time, they had cut down the stump. As you can see, the Bigfoot is sitting on the stump, apparently grubbing it from bugs to eat. It is blending in perfectly with the stump. There was a lot of controversy about this photo, with a lot of folks simply saying that it is a tree stump. Others said it was hoaxed, but I doubt it.

The people at the club said that visitors had been reporting a lot of Bigfoot sightings in recent years. The area has become totally overrun with deer, and this is what the Bigfoots are apparently preying on. I believe this is a photo of a Bigfoot, not a stump and not a hoax.

A Bigfoot grubbing a stump in West Virginia. Note coned head, browridge and relatively hairless face.

Allegations of hoaxing at the Adrian Erickson Project site in Crittenden, Kentucky are wrong. The latest allegation is that the owners of the site were hoaxing Erickson, Dennis Pfohl and Dr. Leila Hadj-Chikh at the site, possibly by using one or more of their friends to run around in a Bigfoot suit while the researchers took photos and videos of the hoaxers. However, this cannot possibly be the case. If this were true, there must be some awfully big hillbillies out there in Kentucky. Why is that? Because according to Erickson, Pfohl and Hadj-Chikh who all observed him, the large male at the site was anywhere from 9-10 feet tall! Do you know any 9 1/2 foot hillbillies? Neither do I.

Bigfoots are people. Look at the various drawings below to see how the latest thinking that Bigfoots are people and not apes, more like us than we want to believe, is the new and improved way of viewing these creatures. First, a drawing of Rick Dyer’s Bigfoot based on dozens of conversations between the artist and Musky Allen.

Rendition of Rick Dyer’s Bigfoot based on Musky Allen’s recollections. Note the resemblance to a Neandertal. Note also the resemblance to the Minnesota Iceman.

It is said that the nose in the Tent Video and in Allen’s rendition are not the same. However, look at the graphic below.

Note similar downward curving nose in photo, rendition and recreation. Rendition is presumably of a Neandertal Man.

Let us look now at some drawings by Harvey Pratt, the artist who worked with David Paulides. These drawings were done by Pratt after talking with witnesses who had seen Bigfoots closeup. Look at how human they are.

Harvey Pratt’s very human-like renditions of Bigfoots based on interviews with humans who had very close up encounters. Note the very human-like appearance.

Below is a drawing by a man who had a closeup encounter a while back. Note the human-like appearance.

Witness rendition of a closeup of a Bigfoot the witness saw a while back. Note similarity to the rendition of the Dyer creature above.

Below is a closeup drawing of the same creature as above.

Closeup of the same creature as above.

Bigfoot News February 23, 2013

World exclusive – Justin Smeja of Sierra Kills fame releases a video at midnight detailing how Dr. Melba Ketchum told him to contaminate his Bigfoot steak sample from the Kills! She did so for unknown reasons, most probably so that other researchers would not use it and scoop her on the Bigfoot DNA story. It was a sleazy thing to do, but I think judging from the circumstances, Melba may have been right to make this morally dubious request. I detailed my reasons for that in the last post. Anyway, this is a blockbuster!

The story and video is on the Sierra Site Project website here.

The Men In Black (MIB’s) may be after Rick Dyer’s Bigfoot! Texas authorities have notified Las Vegas police about possible criminal or Parks and Wildlife violations involved in the events surrounding whatever Dyer did near San Antonio, Texas in September 2012. What all of this means, I have no idea. The people promoting the idea have sources on the SWAT team in Las Vegas and they say that Dyer is hoaxing. If Dyer is hoaxing, why is LE going after him. I hope the MIB’s don’t confiscate the Bigfoot, if it exists!

Two shots hit Dyer’s Bigfoot. It now turns that Dyer fired on the Bigfoot two times, once hitting it in the back and the other time hitting it in the back of the head.

Michael Merchant is doing some great Bigfoot breakdowns lately! I don’t really like his podcasts too much, as he tears apart everything and everyone, but his breakdowns have a whole different attitude about them. Michael is very bright and very funny when he is good.

Michael Merchant breaks down Adirondacks Bigfoot.

This video has never made any sense to me. A friend of mine insisted it was a hoax, and the general view is that it is a hoax. However, this is one of the weirdest hoaxes I have ever seen, if it is a hoax. Look at the huge head! Combined with the small size. It could very well be a juvenile Bigfoot as they have gigantic heads.

Also the ears look exactly like Bigfoot ears, a nice touch that hoaxers almost never get right. It is bending its head back in a very bizarre way, but why would a hoaxer do that. And it goes down on all fours. Why? When do hoaxers ever go on all fours like that. It does look like a gorilla! Very much like a gorilla. All I have to say is that this is one of the weirdest Bigfoot videos I have ever seen!

Michael Merchant breaks down Nassau Bigfoot.

I really do think that this is a Bigfoot, and it is definitely going on all fours.

Michael Merchant breaks down San Juans Bigfoot.

This video is very strange and I cannot make any sense out of it. Whether it is a hoax or whether it is a real Bigfoot, I have no idea. The general view is it is a hoax, but that could be incorrect.

Dr. Melba Ketchum told Justin Smeja that the Bigfoot steak from the Sierra Kills would probably test as “bear” if he sent it out somewhere else! Turns out that Justin et al did send it out elsewhere, and it did test as “bear” from two separate labs. What kind of sense does that make? It makes no sense at all! I am as confused as anyone about this.

Ketchum is not hoaxing. One theory is that Ketchum has nothing but samples from known animals and that she has manipulated or misinterpreted those samples in some way as part of a gigantic scientific hoax. The problem is that that is scientific misconduct for sure if she did that. She would also be sued to Kingdom Come and she could be prosecuted by an enterprising DA for criminal fraud.

Ketchum is a rather shady person for sure (but many of the pillars of our society in business, entertainment and government are shady or worse), but she is not hoaxing. I do not believe that she is capable of scientific misconduct. She doesn’t have it in her, she doesn’t want to be sued and for sure she doesn’t want to go to jail or prison.

As far as ethical challenges, many of the greatest men and women in history had some rather remarkable ethical lapses, yet we still consider them great. Let God sort em out!

Another way we know she is not hoaxing is because I know that Adrian Erickson is not hoaxing. Erickson and his team definitely have samples from real Bigfoots. That’s for sure. If Erickson’s samples are real, then Melba’s samples are real. In addition, for sure Derek Randles and his team is not hoaxing, nor is Larry Jenkins, Mitch Waite, Alex Hearn, Stan Courtney, Larry Surface, Henner Fahrenbach, Rob Alley or JC Johnson. As far as the rest of the submitters, I doubt if most of them are hoaxers, but I don’t know them, so they might possibly be. We always have consider all hypotheses in science.

Critique of Ketchum’s DNA study. Via Tyler Huggins on Bigfoot Forums, who sent the study to a PhD friend of his:

Huggins: I have another, and seemingly final update from my PhD contact who would prefer not to post here:

PhD: “What my analysis says is that the bear sequences are real bear and not just primate sequences that are homologous to bear. That means that a bear was involved. This is consistent with your and Bart’s reports. It also points to the fact that it’s inclusion in the publication was inappropriate, because it adds more confusion than clarity.

I think this is gonna be it for me on this sample. It’s fairly tedious work. It’s pointing to an artifactual mosaic due to the combining of human and bear sequences along with poor quality control of the output. Here is something that you can post:
______________________________________
Further analysis of the sequence associated with Sample 26 indicates that it is 2.7 million nucleotides in length., which is only about 0.1% of the human genome. It tracks from beginning to end with sequences associated with Chromosome 11. Chromosome 11 is 134 million nucleotides in length. So, this would correspond to roughly 0.2% of the content of Chromosome 11.

There are segments that identify with very high significance to Ursid (bear) sequences. One major limitation related to the analysis is that Genbank is fairly limited in Ursid sequences. Most of the Ursid sequences identify with Panda, but Panda is fairly well represented in Genbank compared to black bear and other bears. The Ursid sequences appear to be mainly from coding regions, rather than structural regions.

It is really impossible to compare the Chromosome 11 structural sequences (non-coding) to similar sequences for bears. So, it is possible that there are bear non-coding sequences, as well. This makes it very hard to decipher what might be going on in terms of the source of the sample vs. the contaminant.

So, are the bear sequences real bear or are they primate sequences that identify closely with bear. A distance tree analysis in BLAST using several sequences that identified as phosphatidylserine synthase-2 like coding regions indicates that the Sample 26 version aligns most closely with Ursid sequence (Panda). A primate cluster (human, gorilla, baboon, chimp, rhesus monkey) are highly homologous but more distantly related. Additional sequences from dog, mouse and galigo (Otolemur) were included as outliers and branch further away as might be expected.

So, the upshot here is that the 2.7 million nucleotide data set for Sample 26 is highly flawed, and, therefore, would be nearly impossible to use to determine whether a non-human primate contributed DNA to the sample.”

Ok, based on that, my reading is that Ketchum’s analysis of the Bigfoot DNA from the Sierra steak makes no sense at all. I do not know what that means. It either means that Bigfoot DNA itself makes no sense or that there was something wrong with her analysis.

Craziest Bigfooters of all vindicated by Ketchum DNA study. Via this fascinating webpage of Ketchum’s very unprofessional website (my browsers warned about possible phishing sites due to improper certificates) we see a list of all of the successful submitters to the study. Many are rather unremarkable, but some do stand out.

For instance, Igor Burtsev, widely derided as a kook and quite possibly a hoaxer (he seems to have hoaxed a Bigfoot tour for Dr. Jeff Meldrum in the Kuzbass) nevertheless has 6 successful samples in the study, including one from Russia! 3 of the samples come from Tennessee (Apparently from the Carter Farm!), one from Michigan (Via Robin Lynne’s habituation site no doubt!) and one is from Russia (Which means that Ketchum’s study proves that Yetis are real!)

The Carter Farm is the site of Janice Carter’s story detailed in Mary Green’s book 50 Years with Bigfoot that details Janice’s growing up and living with the Bigfoots on her family farm in Tennessee over the course of a lifetime. It is widely derided as utterly ridiculous, in particular the parts about Fox the Bigfoot, and Janice has been proven to be a hoaxer, at least in part. In one scene, Fox comes to Janice’s door to ask for some garlic, which she gives him!

Janice herself has 7 successful samples in to Ketchum’s study and Melba’s page states that one of the samples was form the late Fox (Fox died in 2010) himself! How she figured that out, I have no idea. Yet the Ketchum study appears to prove that the Bigfoots at the Carter Farm, including the incredible Fox himself, were real, and hence Janice’s story, at least in part, is a true story! Holy Sasquatch!

In addition, Robin Lynne is Melba’s new spokesman and is widely derided as an ultra-kook even in Bigfoot circles. She says there are 10 Bigfoots living in and around her family’s rural property in Michigan. She feeds them fish and blueberry muffins! Once this story got out to the mainstream media, they all had a huge laugh about it. I even thought her story was insane, but apparently Lynne has a successful sample into Ketchum’s study, apparently validating that there are indeed Bigfoots living around her place and that her story is at least in part true. Holy Boogieman!

Bigfoot News February 21, 2013

Dr. Brian Sykes and Dr. Anna Nekaris announce that they will examine Dr. Melba Ketchum’s Bigfoot DNA study! Excellent news. I do not know if these two are the scientists that Ketchum referred to in this statement:

I have independent analysis of our data going on. If the outcome of what we are doing supports our analysis, then we are vindicated. If not, then I will announce that also. It involves top level scientists that have volunteered after I released the paper. If their findings are the same, they will go public. So, please be patient. They also will assure upload to GenBank and they can make that happen.

However, Nekaris and Sykes are definitely going to be looking over her data.

Sykes backs out of Western Bigfoot Society meeting in Oregon. Sykes said his travel agent was unable to change Sykes’ plans for that week to he could go to the USA, so he will not be appearing at that meeting. A disappointment.

Video investigates Rick Dyer Bigfoot shooting.

In this video, a man investigates the Rick Dyer Bigfoot shooting. The area is indeed forested. I had no idea that Texas had such think, nearly tropical, forests! He finds a young homeless man who lives in the forest. The man says that Dyer was indeed in the area camping for one week in September along with a film crew. Also there were two large SUV’s present. Incredibly, the man also says that gunshots were heard in the area during that time.

Large piles of scat that look almost like cow pies are seen in the area, however, there are no cows, and it’s too large to be mountain lion scat. Also there are the remains of a couple of killed turkeys in the area.However, the man says he has never seen a Bigfoot in the area. Very interesting video!

Shout out to 2 women in Bigfoot Forums. Very quickly after the Rick Dyer story broke on Bigfoot Forums (and I am the one who broke that story) 2 women on the forum, JackiLB and VioletX, quickly decided that there was something to the story and that Dyer had indeed shot a Bigfoot. They have held to their conviction through 312 pages of threads, enduring quite a bit of bashing in the process.

I don’t know how they decided that the story was true. Possibly pure female intuition. This is one of the things I love about women – the near psychic nature of their intuitive senses. Men are so often caught up in the logic trap that they can’t think from the seat of their pants, from their guts or straight from their hearts.

One way to look at this thinking is to call it the Gestalt. The Gestalt is “I know it when I see it.” It’s where the total is greater than the sum of its parts.

In bird watching for instance, sometimes I see a bird and I just know that it is a such and such species, even if I catch it only for a glance. If you asked me how I arrived at that conclusion, I probably could hardly even tell you! I arrived at that conclusion through some sum total of everything that I had known and learned about the bird via books, observation, discussion and whatnot. But I couldn’t put my finger on what exactly it was that drove me to that conclusion. It was more of a “I know it when I see it” type thing. The bird simply gave off the “smell,” “vibe” or “feeling” of being a such and such species.

This is the way intuition operates. Detectives use their intuition all the time. So do investigative reporters and investigators of all types. Maybe we need more female detectives.

Anyway, shout out to Violet and Jacki. I am confident they will be proven right in the end. You go girls!

Dyer Bigfoot being stored at the University of Nevada Las Vegas (UNLV). I feel that Rick Dyer is in possession of a Bigfoot that he shot and killed. Dyer has hinted that the Bigfoot is being stored at the UNLV somewhere. This has led to all sorts of speculation and accusations that if this is so, someone would have leaked this information by now. I am not sure that is true, and it may indeed be possible that the Bigfoot is at UNLV.

Dyer had an autopsy done on his Bigfoot. Although this was hinted around by the Musky Allen interview in which he said that he had seen incisions and shaved areas where presumably an autopsy had been done, I con now confirm through a source I have who is very close to Dyer that an autopsy on Dyer’s Bigfoot has in fact been done! Very exciting news.

Derek Randles and Dyer have been communicating for months. I was one of the first people to tell Derek about Dyer’s story, and I told him that I thought Dyer had in fact killed a Bigfoot. Surprisingly, Derek had a very open mind about it, and considered that the story might indeed be true. Derek also stated that there was no bad blood between him and Dyer as Derek tries to get along with everyone. But it is interesting that they have been communicating for some time now. It would be great if Derek could see the dead Bigfoot! Whatever anyone thinks of Derek, we know one thing for sure and that is that he is no hoaxer!

Adrian Erickson Bigfoot documentary has funding problems. A phone call by someone on Bigfoot Forums to Erickson revealed that Erickson has funding problems in terms of getting his documentary released, according to Erickson himself.

Ketchum unethical dealings in the apparent bypassing of peer review to get her paper published. There are accusations that Ketchum engaged in unethical behavior by creating a new journal out of nowhere, the Journal of Advanced Multidisciplinary Exploration in Zoology (this is apparently the journal that she claims to have “bought out”) then dissolving the journal to create her De Novo Journal. It’s not known at all whether Ketchum’s paper passed review at the Journal of Advanced Multidisciplinary Exploration in Zoology, but it could only have been in review for a week or so there.

She has been accused of scientific misconduct for doing this, however, I am not sure if this qualifies as scientific misconduct. At any rate, this is one case where I will support Ketchum’s unethical behavior to the fullest. She needed to get her paper out there, one way or the other, by hook or by crook, and she did it. If she had to bypass peer review in order to do that, so be it. It’s being reviewed by her peers right now in the media anyway. It’s obvious that mainstream science simply refused to look at her data in a fair way. There was no way on Earth they were going to publish an article on Bigfoot DNA, no matter what it said or who wrote it. If that’s the way they were going to be about it, then peer review needed to be bypassed.

Accusation that Melba Ketchum charged $500,000 for genetic work that should have only cost $100,000. I have no idea what to make of this charge or whether or not she ripped anyone off. The people ripped off in this case would have been Erickson and Wally Hersom. Right now it is just one more accusation lobbed at her.

Excellent Ketchum critique on Jon Downes’ Cryptozoology Online page. Downes showed the paper to two zoologists, and this was their response:

ZOOLOGIST #1

I think their methodology looks weak at best, Just their description of the variation in the morphology of the hairs is enough to make me think they have been analyzing hairs of several different species of animal mixed together. One of the photographs of the hairs looks distinctly human to me, whereas one of the others looks more like a bear. Apart from that the paper has a lot of statements they just expect us to take at face value, That’s simply poor science. I can’t see any scientific journal accepting this.

ZOOLOGIST #2

• The English is poorly written. In a normal paper, a high standard of English is assumed, and papers can be rejected based on this. A normal reviewer would jump on this (though obviously small typos and things are found in any paper, as you would expect)

• From the introduction, it is obvious that the writers are not writing from a null position. Because good science is hypothesis driven, you need a null hypothesis to act in opposition to the actual hypothesis (for instance, I hypothesize that compared to the average human, there is a significant difference between the sizes of X and Y. The null hypothesis would be that there is no significant difference). Study introductions should review the literature from an unbiased point of view, make hypotheses accordingly, then go into the study. This kinda doesn’t.

• “Some photographic evidence also exists such as Figure 4 is a reddish brown Sasquatch sleeping in the forest” (page 2, 4th para) is one heck of a statement to give, especially without a reference to a paper (or at least a book!) demonstrating that it is in fact a ‘squatch. To my knowledge, no peer-reviewed paper does so.

• “Video of the same Sasquatch is seen in Supplementary Movie 1 where her respirations are counted at only 6 per minute.” Again, unreferenced assertion of sex and existence of the being as a Sasquatch.

• They end the introduction by telling us what the study finds (in their eyes). This is a poor way to write a paper introduction as it indicates the lack of a null position (again).

• Methods: no references for much of it. If you “thoroughly cleaned [the samples] in a manner consistent with forensic testing procedures” you need to reference the paper you got this from!

• When they talk about “primers”, they don’t show or reference the sequences used! Bad practice.

• No actual academics are on the paper, they are all forensic scientists. A potential bias from influence via funders and the private sector perhaps?

• In the results section, they make inferences and speculations about the data (eg, “With the wide variety of haplotypes in the study and especially with the majority of the haplotypes being European or Middle Eastern in origin, migration into North America by these hominins may have occurred previous to the migration across the Bering land bridge.”). Again, a stupid thing to do, that is what the discussion is for.

• Random crappy readouts from various programs are strewn all over the place with no explanation. Again, shoddy.

• They give it a scientific name. With no haplotype. And the name is not in italics. A mistake which is guaranteed to irritate me.

I feel that these are good critiques. The paper was indeed poorly written up, shoddily presented, etc. It does look rather sloppy. However, I feel that her conclusions were sound anyway, and this is all that matters.

Excellent post by Scott Carpenter. I am getting very tired of everyone piling on Ketchum about this study. Look around the Bigfoot community, at the blogs, Facebook pages and forums, and it’s just pitiful the mud they are dragging this woman through. Absolutely sickening! The consensus is that her study and everything surrounding it is a total catastrophe. A lot of Bigfooters are crying in their beer.

I do not agree with much of this criticism. Though there were definitely some issues with the unprofessional way in which the study was written up and presented, I feel that her data is sound and that she has indeed proven that Bigfoots do exist.

Scott writes:

Now imagine you are Dr. Ketchum, you know what you have, indisputable scientific proof Bigfoot exist. A major journal (Nature) has delayed you repeatedly with frivolous request and leaked your results to others (Sykes). You know mainstream science is trying to make an end run on you via the Sykes study. Sykes has the political power and financial backing to publish quickly. The collective scientific community has done everything they can to keep you from publishing your findings.

Also remember that Wally Hersom and Adrian Erickson have funded the study to the tune of over $300,000! Your professional reputation is ruined, and you just spent 5 years of your life on this project. You have the DNA, you have the solid proof and GenBank will not allow you to upload your sequences leaving the door open for Sykes or another scientist to zoom in and get the credit!  Armed with this knowledge and these circumstances what do you do?

Would you tell Justin Smeja to contaminate his remaining samples so no one else like Sykes could use his political connections and power to beat you and claim discovery for what you already have? Would you have preemptive press releases before your study is published? Would you purchase a journal that has passed your paper only to back out at the last moment due to political pressure in order to preserve the peer reviews and editorial independence?

I have attacked Ketchum for supposedly telling Justin to contaminate the sample to make it unusable. I thought that was sleazy as Hell. But now that Scott has publisher her possible motivation for doing so, I think she may have been correct in fact to do just that! Although it was a dirty thing to do, and I do not like to act dirty myself, this may have been the right thing to do in the end. Why judge her?

Her preemptive press releases and the purchasing of the journal and possible bypassing of peer review also seem more sensible in this light. If this is what she needed to do, then do it. The preemptive press releases and end run around peer review were done in order to head off Sykes at the pass. The scientific community was bypassing Ketchum, but they may not have been willing to bypass Sykes, so in order to beat Sykes to the punch when she was first anyway, and given the frozen mindset preventing her from publishing, she did what she had to do.

Now personally, I would not have the guts to end-run peer review, etc. I do not think I could do that. Granted, it’s pretty dirty. But Ketchum was fighting against some forces acting pretty dirty against her too. Maybe you gotta do what you gotta do.

Scott also gets to the meat of Ketchum’s study here:

In other words the DNA is:
1. NOT Contaminated
2. All from 3 individuals (Bigfoot) not a mixture or contaminated
3. The results are repeatable
4. The SAME results were returned on 3 different samples from 3 different individuals, collected from 3 different locations, and at 3 different times.
5. The lab that ran the data is well respected, accredited, and independent
6. The results are rock solid and indisputable.

Right. And now let Scott explain why he says this:

First let me explain the “Q30″ scores that just zoomed over our collective heads. This is the key, this is why the critics are afraid, VERY afraid. Dr. Ketchum extracted and purified three samples (26, 31 and 140) with large amounts of high quality DNA. (Note that sample 26 came from the alleged killing of two Bigfoot by Justin Smeja aka “The Sierra Kills”).

She then sent these samples off to the University of Texas, Southwestern laboratory for sequencing. The UT laboratory used a widely accepted and proven process known as “the next generation Illumina platform”. The machine that process the the samples is known as a HiSeq 2000 next generation sequencer. Here is an excerpt from the DNA study that explains what a “Q30″ score is and what it means.

From the Ketchum paper: “The HiSeq 2000 next generation sequencer provides scores, Q30, for run quality​78​. Q30 can also be used to determine if there was any contamination (or mixture) found in the samples sequenced. According to Illumina, a pure, single source sample would have an Q30 score of 80 or greater with an average of 85. However, if there was contamination present in the sample sequenced, the divergent sequences would compete against one another prior to sequencing causing a contaminated sample to have a Q30 score of 40 to 50.

The Q30 scores for the three genomes sequenced had Q30 scores of 88.6, 88.4 and 88.7 respectively for samples 26, 31 and 140. The Q30 is the percent of the reads that have the statistical probability greater than 1:1000 of being correctly sequenced. Therefore, not only were the sequences from a single source, but the quality of the sequences were far above the average genome sequenced using the Illumina next generation sequencing platform.

The high quality of the genomes can be attributed to the stringent extraction procedures utilized whereby the DNA was repeatedly purified. This ultra-purified DNA also allowed for greater than 30X coverage of the three genomes. The summary and of the next generation sequencing generated by the HiSeq 2000 Illumina sequencer is furnished as Supplementary Data 7-10.”

The “Q30″ is a score that tells us how pure DNA is. The manufacture states that anything at or above a score of 80 is pure and NOT contaminated! Again let me repeat the scores were 88.6, 88.4, and 88.7 respectively.

As you can see, based on those Q30 scores, the DNA was not contaminated in any way, shape or form. So the whole contamination canard needs to be thrown out the window once and for all! The DNA was not contaminated! Repeat after me. Over and over now!

Reason for Ketchum not uploading the gene sequences to GenBank. Critics have bashed her mercilessly over this one, but apparently there was a good reason for this too. Apparently GenBank requires a signed release accompany any sequences containing human genes from the person whose genes they are. This is usually not a problem, but Ketchum’s Bigfoot samples contain human genes! So in other words, Melba would have had to get the Bigfoots who gave the samples to all sign release forms releasing their DNA to GenBank.

Apparently none of the Bigfoots whose genes she sampled was able to sign off on any of those papers! Most of them could not even be located, and those that could no doubt could not understand the request, don’t know what paper and a pens are or how to use them, and furthermore, are no doubt not literate enough to know how to sign their names, assuming they even have names in the first place!

However, the scientists reviewing her data told Melba that they will arrange having her DNA uploaded to GenBank.

Bigfoot News February 18, 2013

Dr. Brian Sykes to speak at US Bigfoot conference! Yes, it is incredible news. Sykes has been invited by Rhettman Mullis to speak at a meeting of Mullis’ Bigfoot organization, The Western Bigfoot Society, on March 9 in North Lombard, Oregon. From the link:

I announced that Ray Crowe is feeling well enough to have some new Western Bigfoot Society meetings, the first one being on March 9th. What is very exciting is that Dr. Bryan Sykes has accepted my invitation to come to the meeting and he will give an update to his project. I look forward to my family dining with Dr. Sykes on Friday, March 8th, and having him speak at the Western Bigfoot Society meeting on March 9th. He will update us on his DNA project but will be limited on what he can share as his project is still in the analysis phase.

I have sent him a copy of Melba Ketchum’s paper, as I also sent a copy to Dr. Anna Nekaris to get both of their expert views. I am hoping that Dr. Sykes will be able to provide some words regarding his opinion/concerns of the study as he is the most qualified to do so.

I am also hoping that team members will be able to meet with him privately before the WBS meeting that Saturday evening, but that has yet to be arranged.

I would guess that there is a good probability  that Sykes is going to report positive news on the Bigfoot genetics front, but I cannot be sure about that.

I would like to add that I think Rhettman Mullis is one of the most professional and classiest folks in all of Bigfootery. How he stays out of the mud, I have no idea.

The news has shaken up the hardcore skeptic scumbags over at James Randi’s pitiful “scientific” JREF Forums site, with some of the nastiest and ugliest hardcore skeptics now suggesting that there may indeed such a thing as Bigfoot after all. Most of them over there do respect Sykes and his work, so if Sykes verifies Bigfoots’ existence, as he may well do, this is going to put these dirtballs in a very difficult place indeed. One of the worst skeptics of all is a snarky woman named Sharon Hill. I would so love to see her humiliated.

Bigfoot DNA on Twitter. The “scientific” establishment is all a-twitter over Ketchum’s latest journal article. Almost unanimously, they are falling all over themselves to act childish and ridicule her. But we know who will have the last laugh. We Bigfooters will! We know who will be grotesquely and horribly humiliated. The “scientific” establishment. Carl Zimmer in particular, who is for some reason a respected “science” writer (Why?) has in particular made a disgusting display of his ignorance. His future abasement awaits!

Dr. Melba Ketchum Bigfoot DNA paper will be reviewed by outside scientists – possibly Brian Sykes himself. Ketchum stated recently that outside scientists have offered to try to replicate her data:

I have independent analysis of our data going on. If the outcome of what we are doing supports our analysis, then we are vindicated. If not, then I will announce that also. It involves top level scientists that have volunteered after I released the paper. If their findings are the same, they will go public. So, please be patient. They also will assure upload to GenBank and they can make that happen.

This is some startling news. This review may take up to 6-12 months at the outside. They are going to review it to see if there is something there or not. If there is nothing there, Ketchum is wrong. If they validate Ketchum, so much the better. A source has now informed me that she thinks that the outside scientist who had offered to review Ketchum’s findings is none other than Sykes himself! The source told me it was just an educated guess, but she told me that that her hunches are usually correct. We shall see!

Rick Dyer’s dead Bigfoot is having it’s DNA tested. As we reported earlier, Dyer shot and killed a Bigfoot in Texas during September of last year. Although Dyer hates me, what he doesn’t realize is that I have sources right inside of his very closest circle. One of these sources has just informed me that Dyer is presenting having genetic sequencing done on his dead Bigfoot. The sequencing is apparently being done by a major lab or university.

Derek Randles to view Rick Dyer’s dead Bigfoot. Dyer’s bigfoot is being stored somewhere about 4 hours outside of Las Vegas, Nevada at a secure facility. There was a lot of huffing and puffing about Musky Allen viewing the body, with cries that Allen is in on a hoax. However, Randles has no connection to Dyer and even his worst enemies insist that Derek is no hoaxer. I agree with that assessment. It will be interesting to see what they come up with.

Great roundup on Bigfoot DNA reports by Loren Coleman. I have uttered some unkind words about Coleman in the past and vice versa, but with this writeup here, I think he has done a fine job. There is some excellent criticism of Ketchum’s work (and her paper is flawed to be honest) if you follow Loren’s links.Jon Downes’ link is particularly good. Whatever his faults, Coleman has long believed in Bigfoot and via his site and his books, he has been one of the primary figures in popularizing Bigfoot to the masses. His books are also quite entertaining if credulous. With the coming discovery, I expect increased fame and possibly riches for Coleman and other “early adopters.” Shout out!

Rehabilitation of Alex Hearn and Mitch Waite of AZCRO. I recently spoke to Hearn, which whom I had a big falling out, and he and I patched things up well. Hearn is a bit of a hothead, but deep down inside, I think he is a good person. I also did not understand Waite. I now think he is one of the nicest guys in Bigfootery. You don’t have to do much to earn that title – just avoid being a total scumbag – but Mitch has earned it. Together, I think these two are one of the class acts of Bigfootery. You may beg to differ.

Both men have been on TV recently showing off Larry Jenkins’ Bigfoot toenail, which they did get back from Melba Ketchum. There has been controversy about whether or not Melba sent samples back to people after she got done with them. Many said she refused to give them back their samples, but Larry got his back.

The saga of Larry’s toenail and the various figures, Tom Biscardi, Ketchum, Larry, Alex Hearn, Java Bob Schmaltzbach, and the late Richard Stubstad, is a long and convoluted one, replete with the usual Bigfootery nonsense regarding recriminations, people screwing each other over, backstabbing, attempts to cut people out of the loop, treachery and all the usual warm, tender loving caresses that one finds in a typical Bigfootery soap opera. If you go to Alex’s page on Facebook, he can update you on the whole confusing story, which I do not even want to deal with right now to be honest!

The Bigfootery Enquirer. Neat site. He’s wrong about a lot of thing and he’s way too cynical, but he’s basically right about the clowns, idiots, fools, dirtballs, scumbags, criminals, liars, cheaters, thieves and all around con artists and general scoundrels that make up our glorious and illustrious community.

Not to mention the incessant egotism, the constant fighting between ego cases, the showboating, the over the top narcissism, the wild arrogance, the idiotic posturing and histrionics, the Cluster B, Type A types right amok and the general attitude of anything goes “Gold Fever.” So Bigfootery is not unlike the Gold Rush around 1849 here in California. A 20 year crime wave, one of the worst the world had ever seen, ensued. Gold fever! Bigfoot fever!

A friend of mine is a ghost hunter. She says that Bigfootery is full of lunatics, psychos and crooks because of the fringe nature of the subject. She says that ghost hunting is full of sociopaths, narcissists, loons, idiots and all manner of marginal types too. With discovery, hopefully Bigfootery can take out the human trash, put in on the curb of the planet to be deposited in a dump somewhere, and maybe we will get a new infusion of a more normal cross section of humanity.

Bigfoot News February 15, 2013

Dr. Melba Ketchum Bigfoot DNA paper is good. I have now read a bootleg copy of the 63 page paper I obtained a few days ago. At the same time, I obtained a number of supplementary charts, graphs and whatnot that go may or may not go along with the official version of the paper that you get for $30.

The paper is good. I like it a lot. I thought she did an excellent job on it. It is also very well written. The conclusions are as we discussed earlier on this blog. The MtDNA is human, and the NuDNA is some sort of a archaic  hominid in the genus Homo.

Particularly interesting were the extreme measures taken to guard against contamination of the DNA with human DNA by handlers and other animal DNA. There was no DNA from any other known animals present in any of the samples. None of the samples had any human DNA contamination that would explain the results. The samples were very, very pure DNA, purer than one usually gets from humans.

From Bigfoot Forums:

“The team, led by Dr. Melba S. Ketchum, DVM, of DNA Diagnostics in Nacogdoches, TX, sequenced the three whole nuclear genomes using the next-generation Illumina HiSeq 2000 platform at University of Texas, Southwestern from a tissue sample, a saliva sample, and a blood sample.

The three genomes all attained Q30 quality scores above 88 on the Illumina platform, significantly higher than the platform average of 85, indicating highly-purified, single-source DNA with no contamination for each sample. The three Sasquatch genomes align well with one another and show substantial homology to primate sequences.” (from the PR release).

NOTE: The Three Q30 Scores of the three Genomes,with over 90 GB of Raw sequence for each sample (Comprising greater than 30x coverage) were 88.6, 88.4 and 88.7 respectively. The Q30 is the percent of reads that have the statistical probability greater than 1:1000 of being correctly sequenced (According to Illumina, a pure single source sample would have a Q30 score of 80 or greater with an average of 85).

Therefore, not only were the 3 sequences submitted from a single source, but the quality of the sequences were FAR ABOVE the average 85 Score on genomes sequenced using the Illumina Next Generation Sequencing Platform AT THE UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS Southwestern in Dallas, Texas”.

A Further comment was: “The high quality of the Genomes can be attributed to the STRINGENT EXTRACTION PROCEDURES UTILIZED WHEREBY THE DNA WAS REPEATEDLY PURIFIED”.

The MtDNA results, while human, were odd, with some SNP’s (mutations) and other variations not present in any known human samples. The NuDNA samples were very odd, with a combination of human and archaic Homo DNA of a very novel type. Many NuDNA genes had SNP’s far in excess of the known human standard. Further, the NuDNA codes far away from any known humans on this Earth. In distance from humans, it is further away than Neandertal and even from Denisovans. This implies a split in the NuDNA line of possibly up to 1 million years ago.

The NuDNA results look nothing at all like what one would get from human contamination. The paper goes to great lengths to rule that out and explain the reasoning behind it. Nor are the NuDNA results what one would expect based on contamination with known animals. The paper also explains that very well.

Nor were the samples degraded. Degraded DNA has a particular appearance to it that this DNA lacked. Ketchum utilized a degraded human DNA control to test her sequences against it.

One geneticist said that the results look like what you might get if the sequences failed to amplify well. Ketchum explains in the paper that she had a great deal of difficulty getting the sequences to amplify with many failures to amplify, partial amplifications and whatnot. This is because the primers she was using were designed for humans. She had to utilize next generation, very modern and cutting edge sequencing methods to get this very interesting DNA to amplify at all. Whether the results can be explained by “failure to amplify well” is not something I am capable of commenting on.

Another geneticist said that the odd results including the bizarre mixture of single and double strand DNA (apparently not seen in any other known species) can be explained by artifacts of the testing process. I am not competent to comment on that. Apparently this very odd looking DNA (when observed under electron microscope) is what people were talking about when they said that the DNA was from aliens or angels or was “not of this Earth.” Wally Hersom and David Paulides have been very big on this explanation. Surely, this bizarre DNA is very odd, but Bigfoots are very odd creatures. It’s certainly possible that they might have a novel DNA structure.

Other attacks on the paper are much sillier. Most center around the notion that Bigfoots are apes and therefore they could not breed with humans. But Ketchum’s paper states emphatically that Bigfoots are not apes. They are hominids, probably Homo Heidelbergensis (that is my opinion and not Ketchum’s – nowhere in the paper does she name the archaic Homo that they think is in the NuDNA line). Obviously another hominid could have bred with humans.

Another compliant is that Melba has not uploaded her sequences to GenBank yet. But apparently she is waiting to do just that.

I do not feel that this paper is a failure at all. What is occurring is what I predicted would occur. The scientific community refuses to accept the existence of this very real species, and they refuse to accept this DNA evidence for that reason. I have been predicating for a long time now that science would not accept the DNA evidence no matter how good it was.

Is it possible that Melba botched the paper and screwed up her proof of Bigfoot? We all know that she had real Bigfoot samples she was dealing with in the study, so all that remained was for her to successfully isolate the DNA and then prove that it was from Bigfoots and not something else. I feel that she did this, but I am not a geneticist. But perhaps she did botch it. I don’t have the expertise to make that determination.

Much has been made of the fact that Melba published in her own journal. However, she did say that it passed peer review in a journal called the Journal of Advanced Multidisciplinary Exploration in Zoology. However, Melba stated that the journal’s attorneys said that if they published the paper, it would destroy the journal’s reputation, so they said they would not publish it. Melba responded by purchasing the journal and renaming it DeNovo Journal.

Melba describes in detail her tribulations at the altar of modern science. Many journals refused to even so much as look at her paper. Others leaked the names of her peer reviewers and did all sorts of unethical things. This is what Melba has been putting up with for 16 months now at the hands of the “scientific community.” They simply flat out refuse to believe that her findings are true, so they won’t even read or pass via review her paper no matter how valid her findings are.

Given these circumstances and the fact that she did finally pass review at an obscure journals, Melba was right and proper to purchase the journal named above when even it refused to publish her findings despite passing them via review. She did the right thing. The findings are correct, Bigfoots exist, and Melba has proven it in my opinion. This information had to get out to the public, and she persevered and did the right thing.

I think the community should all get behind Melba right now, whatever her moral failings. She has been up there on the cross suffering for all of us, for our entire community, for 16 months now, while the legions of science poked her with their lances and jeered at her. She did it for us. She suffered for all of us. All of the pain we all suffer from skeptics – she took all of our pain and bundled it up for us into one giant mass and took it up there with her on the cross of Bigfootery, where she been slowly dying, being tortured to death, for over a year now. Our pain is her pain. Our torture is her torture. She took our pain and made it hers so we wouldn’t have to suffer it too.

This whole episode has been very hard on Melba. You can see it in her face and hear it in her voice. She says if she had to do it over again, she wouldn’t do it. But she did it. She took it on the chin for us all, falling on the grenade so we might live. And how many of us have her back? Basically none of us.

Adrian Erickson Project video released. An Erickson project video of Matilda the sleeping Bigfoot has been released. It is about 18 seconds long and shows what looks like a bundle of fur on the ground in the forest. It takes one giant breath during the footage. The camera then switches to Dennis Pfohl explaining that analysis of the footage showed the Matilda was breathing at 6 breaths per minute.

Matilda is an adolescent female Bigfoot that was part of the Erickson Project. She, her mother and her father were residing in the woods near a property on Mann Road in Crittenden, Kentucky. She was filmed as part of the study, and in addition, blood and tissue from her fingers was obtained and tested as part of the DNA paper. This was obtained by super-gluing glass shards to a paper plate and then putting food on it. Matilda went for the food and cut the tips of her fingers on the glass. Amazing she still came back around for more pancakes after that.

Later in the study, Matilda become pregnant and then had a little baby Bigfoot. It’s not known who the Mack Daddy was who knocked her up, but it was probably not her father as it is hypothesized that Bigfoots have an incest taboo. Probably the presence of a curvaceous, hormonal, nubile, boy-crazed teenage Bigfoot hottie in the woods attracted some Bigfoot gangsta G who homed in on the hairy teen sexpot and knocked her up.

The 18 second video is only part of a longer 6 minute video. At the end of the video, Matilda wakes up.

There is indeed another video of Matilda walking towards the camera. Matilda has small, “perky,” uplifted breasts that are typical for adolescent female Bigfoots. As you can tell from the Patterson footage, as Bigfoot chicks age, they get a serious case of the sags. Fans of 1970′s porn will be happy to see Matilda, as unlike most young women these days, she refuses to shave even in the slightest.

In the video, the wary and wily feral teen then spots the camerawoman. Upon spotting the human, the defiant teen Bigfoot snarls and growls at the camera, then turns and walks away. When she growls, the hairy hottie reveals black gums and two long fanged incisors. I knew teenage girls were snotty little brats, but this is taking things to a new low. That beats Mean Girls by far!

Disposition of Erickson Project footage. I broke the news a while back that Erickson had sold out of Bigfootery and that Melba now has access to his footage. As the release of Erickson’s video in tandem with the study indicates, Melba indeed has access to Erickson’s material. In addition, I believe that National Geographic TV also has access to Erickson’s material. I know for a fact that Nat Geo has some of Erickson’s material at this very moment, acquired via Melba.

Ketchum tried to get Justin Smeja to tamper with his Bigfoot sample! Amazing story that is just breaking right now. Smeja is the man who shot and killed two Bigfoots in the Sierra Nevadas of California in 2010. A source has informed me that Melba asked Smeja to tamper with his sample after she realized that she was not going to get any more of it. She had been bothering him for all of his sample for some time.

No one knows why she wanted all of the sample, but the folks around Smeja thought she wanted it so that no one would be able to replicate her results. When Justin refused to hand over the remains of what he had, in January 2012, Melba told him over the phone to tamper with the sample. Several people were in the room – including at least Justin, Justin’s wife and the driver who was with Justin the day he shot the Bigfoots – when she said that, and they all heard her make that statement via a speakerphone.

It’s not known why she wanted Justin to mess with his sample or how she wanted him to tamper with it. One theory was that by tampering with it, it would make the sample, possibly not from a Bigfoot, appear to come from a Bigfoot. But that does not seem to be possible. How do you tamper with a piece of bear meat to make it look like it came from a Bigfoot?

What is more likely is that she spitefully wanted him to tamper with his sample to make it damaged and unusable by any other researchers. Apparently she wanted to be the only researcher to have access to that sample. She was afraid that if he sent it off to someone else, they could publish and usurp her with the Bigfoot DNA data, stealing her thunder.

Melba is all about pure raw ambition, 100%. She has the morals of Bill Gates when it comes to doing or saying anything or using anyone in any way to achieve her single-minded ruthless goals. This type of sleazy behavior – trying to get Justin to basically destroy his sample so no one could one-up her – is exactly in line with what we have come to expect from this viciously competitive and morally stunted woman.

Justin did not take her up on her offer to tamper with his sample. It was this offer that seriously soured Justin and Bart Cutino on Melba. As Bart put it (not in these exact words), they both thought she was a sleazeball and a morally suspect person. Asking Justin to damage his sample was so sleazy and shady that they began to wonder whether this amoral behavior had shaded over into her study. In short, they both began to wonder whether she was morally reputable enough to conduct the DNA study. This was the main reason why they took Justin’s steak to an outside source, where it bizarrely tested for Justin’s DNA and Black bear, results that I cannot explain.

In Ketchum’s defense though, see the comments from Caz in the comments section of this post. Caz suggests that perhaps Ketchum was merely making a request to alter the sample so it could store more properly.

In regard to Ketchum and Smeja discussing modifying the sample, I know nothing, but you should leave open the possibility that the comments were well-intentioned. If a layperson held a sample that I deemed valuable, then I would be very concerned about its storage. Regular freezers (-20 C) are completely inadequate for biological storage. You need to store it in industrial-grade -80 C freezers.

Also, contamination can be problem not just for sequencing, but also because it degrades the sample, even when frozen at -20C. I would ask that the outer edges of the sample be cut away and the core stored properly. I don’t have any insider knowledge about the project. I am just saying the world has not yet heard the other side of the story.

Smeja’s Bigfoot steak in Ketchum’s DNA paper. Having read the paper, a fair amount of the paper is devoted to Justin’s piece of Bigfoot from the Sierra Kills. Not only were the hairs on the steak not aligned with any known animals, they did not look like human hairs either. A piece of the steak was sent off to a forensics lab in Texas where the team noted that superficially the skin, hair follicles and dermal layer appeared human, however all of these things differed from human beings in a number of ways.

In addition, the steak was one of three samples in which the full NuDNA gene was sequenced. The result for the steak was approximately 2.7 billion base pairs. In short, the description of the steak in the paper does not in any way support the findings of Justin Smeja (human)/Black bear that was found by the Canadian lab. The reason for the differential findings is not known.

List of labs Ketchum blind outsourced her material to. From the paper:

Analysis for Hire Laboratories Used in the Blind Study:

The following laboratories provided sequencing and analysis of samples in the study on a work for hire basis and were not initially told the origin of the samples being tested until after the samples were tested:

Family Tree DNA Genomics Research Center, 1445 North Loop West, Suite 820, Houston, TX
77008

SeqWright, Inc., 2575 W. Bellfort St. Suite 2001, Houston, TX 77054

UT Southwestern Medical Center, 6000 Harry Hines Blvd. NA7.116, Dallas, TX 75235-9093

USC Norris Comprehensive Cancer Center, 1441 Eastlake Avenue, Los Angeles, CA 90033

Texas A&M University, Microscopy & Imaging Center, Department of Biology and Department of Biochemistry & Biophysics, College Station, TX 77843-2257

Texas Veterinary Medical Diagnostic Laboratory, College of Veterinary Medicine, Texas A&M University, College Station, Texas 77843

Southwestern Institute of Forensic Sciences, 2355 North Stemmons Fwy., Dallas, TX 75207

Why not make the Ketchum paper available? I have been asked to make the entire Ketchum paper available for free. However, it is Dr. Ketchum’s copyrighted work, work for which she is now asking $30 a pop for people to purchase. As an author myself, I do not particularly like people stealing my work. Out of respect for Dr. Ketchum and because I am an honorable man, I will not put the entire paper online. That is another reason I have not been direct quoting much from the paper. I don’t want to seem to be violating her copyright.