US Conservatives Are Not Evil; They Are Insane

I really don’t think most US conservatives are evil or bad. I just think they are wrong. Actually I do not think they are wrong. I know they are wrong. Almost everything they say and believe is simply wrong. For the most part, what they believe are lies, nonsense, crap, idiocy and bullshit. If we know a human being whose beliefs are all nonsensical, we usually won’t say he is evil. We might be charitable and just say he is a nutcase.

Almost all of the problems with US conservatives are because they are ludicrously partisan. To be partisan is one thing, but a conservative will never admit he is partisan.

Let us look at some examples:

Benghazi Embassy scandal: There was no scandal. Al Qaeda is waging a global war on us, and they will attack our troops and embassies any chance they can get. The Administration tried their hardest to fortify the embassy, as hard as any other administration would have tried. The diplomatic aspect of the state in the State Department is nonpartisan. Embassy personnel are staffed via the Pentagon and the CIA and contractors. Under any administration, priority will be on protecting the lives of diplomatic personnel and the integrity of US embassies.

Democratic administrations are not so stupid as to scrimp on security overseas, and there is no evidence that Republicans protect embassies any better than Democrats. One of the worst attacks ever on a US embassy occurred in 1983 when Hezbollah hit the US Embassy in Beirut. Almost all the American “civilians” killed were working for the CIA, but don’t let that bother you.

As sometimes happens, our enemies got the best of us one day in Libya. This would never have happened under Gaddafi, but we overthrew him and put Al Qaeda in charge of Libya, so that’s why our embassy got overrun.

Truth be told, wasn’t the 9-11 attack on the US far worse than the Benghazi attack in which one ambassador was killed? On 9-11, 3,000 Americans were killed, on our own soil nonetheless. But somehow to conservatives this is not a failure to protect the US homeland and citizens, but an attack that kills one ambassador is? That’s just partisan bullshit; it’s nothing more and nothing less.

If the Benghazi attack occurred under a Republican President, conservatives would not have said a word. Security failures only occur under Democratic Presidents, never under Republican Presidents. If 9-11 would have occurred under a Democratic President, conservatives would still be screaming about how “the liberals let Al Qaeda attack us.” But since it happened under a Republican, you will never hear a word of this. This makes no sense. 9-11 was either a security failure or it was not. It can’t be the case that it would have been a security failure under a Democrat, but since it occurred under a Republican, it could not possibly be one.

Lie: Obama represents something called “Chicago-style politics.” The implication here is that Obama is corrupt to the core, a representative of corrupt Chicago Democratic Party-labor union machine politics going back decades. The truth is that that corrupt machine got dismantled quite some time ago. It is true that Democratic politics in Chicago used to be very corrupt, especially under Mayor Daley. Corrupt elections were the norm, and dead people voted early and often.

Corrupt Democratic crooks in Chicago stole so many votes in Chicago in 1960 that they probably gave John F. Kennedy the election. So JFK no doubt stole his way into office. The dead have not voted in Chicago in quite some time, and federal RICO prosecutions and raids have pretty much shut down the overtly corrupt aspect of Chicago politics. To my knowledge, Chicago politics nowadays is no more corrupt than the politics of any other large US city.

Furthermore, there is no evidence that Obama is part of any Chicago corrupt Daley-style machine. That machine was made up of old style ethnic Whites, and the new Democratic politics in Chicago is much more progressive, even radical, and clean. It’s true that Penny Pritzger, Rahm Emanuel and Bill Ayers were part of the local politics scene, but neither one is corrupt. In fact Ayers and other radical types would be very against that sort of thing. Emanuel and and Pritzger come out of US finance capital and are as corrupt or non-corrupt as anyone tied at the hip to Wall Street as almost 100% of the Republican Party is.

How about Obama since he has been in office? There is no evidence that the Obama Administration is particularly corrupt as an Executive Branch. Sure, they take lots of corporate money, but the Republicans take way more, and that’s all legal anyway. There have been very few serious corruption cases under Obama.

The truth is that corruption in the US reached an all-time recent high under Ronald Reagan. It was also very high under George Bush Jr. The more capitalist the political party is, the more corrupt it is. The Democrats are not so wedded to US big business and multinational corporations as Republicans are, hence you see a lot less corruption. Any political party with profound ties to Big Capital will almost always be extremely corrupt. This fact can even be shown on a worldwide scale. Parties that are more socialist or populist and less tied to the rich and Big Capital will tend to be less corrupt since there is less Big Money to go around and they at least pay lip service to the lower 80% of the population.

Conclusion: There is no “Chicago-style politics” anymore, and even if there is, Obama is not representative of it. The old machine is dead and gone, possibly never to be revived. That Obama is some corrupt, vote-stealing, bribe-taking, brutal Daley style machine crook is simply nonsense.

Lie: Obama is killing the Keystone XL pipeline because he has ties to the Waltons, heirs to the Walmart fortune, who will lose big money if the pipeline goes through. Truth is that Obama, corporatist that he is, largely supports the Keystone XL, but he is under huge pressure from environmentalists to cave in. So Obama the corporatist is caught between his Big Money backers in Big Oil (Obama is a strong supporter of Big Oil) and the environmentalists on the Left of his party.

Obama, being a rightwing corporate capitalist whore, is inclined to support the pipeline because his corporate pimps demand it of him. However, he is pressured from the Left to kill the pipeline. So he is caught in a bind. The only wavering he is doing at all is because he is under pressure from environmentalists. If he stops Keystone XL, it will be because the environmentalists convinced him.

Conclusion: Obama has no position on Keystone XL, but is inclined to support it. But he is under pressure from his Left to kill it. The verdict is up to him.

Lie: Environmental organizations lie about the environment because they are paid many millions of dollars to lie about it. This is simply not true. Environmental groups are not corrupt, and there is no money in protecting the environment. There are no rich or business interests paying off environmental activists to do this or that. The entire environmental movement really is anti-capitalist.

Its goal is to shut down or regulate various capitalist enterprises so they can not make any money at all since they are not allowed to start up or because their operations are shut down. In other cases, it seeks to regulate capitalist enterprises in such a way as to limit the profits of Capital. The capitalists are the ones with money in capitalist societies. Since the goals of environmentalists’ projects are to limit or in some cases to disallow capitalists’ profits, no capitalist will ever support this movement.

It is certainly possible that there are rich people somewhere dishing out millions of dollars to environmental groups in order to lie about environmental problems, but there is no evidence that this is occurring. Anyway, US environmental problems are bad enough that there is no need to lie about anything; the truth is bad enough as it is. I have been following this movement for decades now and I have never uncovered a single case of environmentalists inventing nonexistent problems or even exaggerating current ones. There’s no need to do so. If projects are environment-friendly, environmentalists are content to let them go forward.

Conclusion: There are no environmental groups lying about environmental problems as the truth is bad enough. 100% of the lying is on the side of the capitalist destroyers and polluters who obviously have huge pecuniary interest in lying. No one is giving millions of $ to environmentalists to make up lies, and there is no evidence that no one ever has.

Lie: China and India are causing the majority of global warming, so we needn’t worry about global warming here in the US. Pollute away!

The truth is that China and India together cause ~8% of global warming in the world. Sure it is on the rise, but that is the current figure. Most global warming is coming out of the West.

Conclusion: The West is causing global warming, not the rest of the world.

Lie: Barack Obama, radical Islamist Kenyan born Muslim, is supporting the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. The MB are radical Al Qaeda style terrorists who hate the US and Israel. It is true that the MB are radical Islamists and they are pretty nasty. But a Republican administration would probably also support the MB regime in Egypt. Egypt gets that $2-3 billion/year as a payoff for making peace with Israel back in 1979.

So all those billions are not going for the radical Islamist MB in Egypt, instead it is going for a bunch of Jews squatting in Palestine. It’s a payoff to the Jews, nothing more, nothing less. If you’re upset about it, head on over to Hymietown, find yourself a deli, and complain to anyone who will listen to you.

Truth is that due to geopolitics, a Republican administration would probably have to support the MB to the tune of $2-3 billion a year too. If you cut off all that aid, Egypt might just tear up that peace treaty with Israel, and we can’t have that. So the aid stays, no matter which administration is in charge.

Besides, there is not a whole lot of evidence that the Egyptian MB is any more radical Islamist than the radical Sunni Islamist regimes in the Gulf. Kuwait, Qatar, Bahrain, UAE, Saudi Arabia, Oman and Yemen are all run by radical Islamist regimes. In fact, the Egyptian MB has very deep ties to the Wahhabi clergy in Saudi Arabia, and it was the emigration of many MB Islamists to Saudi Arabia due to persecution by secular regimes that helped fuel Al Qaeda in the first place.

What created Al Qaeda? Al Qaeda was created when large numbers of MB activists from Egypt and then later from Syria migrated to Saudi Arabia due to persecution by secular regimes in Egypt and Syria. The Wahhabi clerics had been rather quietist up until this point. But the MB cadres were radicalized by persecution and torture in their homelands, and they riled up the locals, turning up the heat on the quietist Wahhabi clergy. It was out of this union of Mediterranean MB activists with Saudi Wahhabi clergy that Al Qaeda itself was born.

Conclusion: Obama probably doesn’t like the Egyptian MB regime any more than any Republican would. But the rules of geopolitics are that Egypt must be supported as a consequence of US support for Israel. As with so many things in the Middle East, all roads lead back to Jerusalem.

Bigfoot News April 13, 2013

I have been asked to appear on three TV shows. Since November 2012, I have been asked to appear on three TV shows. One was a documentary film out of Canada, the other was History Channel show that I cannot name, and the other was a show about conspiracies. The latter two were out of Hollywood.

All three shows were more or less “documentary” style shows or films along the lines of what you see on the History Channel or the Discovery Channel. They deal with conspiracies or unknown, weird subjects in general. I don’t think I should name any of the shows right now. One show was never approved, and the other one could not travel me down there on the very short notice required.

I am thinking of getting myself an agent! I think I need to go to the hair stylist too. The glasses were replaced long ago, for all the trolls that are so exercised about that. I am an introvert, and I am actually not too wild about being on TV or fame in general. It’s more scary than anything else. Who needs fame? Just give me the women and the money, that’s all I ask.

New information on the ending of Minnow Films’ Shooting Bigfoot. I had previously thought that the movie ends with Rick Dyer shooting the Bigfoot and then the screen just goes blank and you wonder what it is that you just saw. However, a source just informed me that the film will show Dyer shooting the Bigfoot, and then that scene will just end without explanation.

The actual ending of the movie will show Morgan Matthews, the director, on a plane apparently flying back to London. He is holding the camera at his face and filming himself. You can clearly see black and blue bruises all over his face, either from the altercation with Hank, the Bigfoot Rick shot, or from the fist fight with Dyer and possibly others afterwards.

Dyer confirms my story about the three photos of Hank (the Bigfoot Dyer shot) sent to Musky Allen by email. The other day on Rick’s radio show, a caller called in and asked about my description of the three pics that Musky had received. Rick said that my description was 100% correct, and he was surprised at the accuracy of my information. “However he is getting his info, he is right.”

Other sources confirm my story about Hank being held in a government research facility near Las Vegas, Nevada. A source informed me that sources around the Dyer camp where wondering where I got this information that the body is being held in a government research facility near Las Vegas and that a government team has been tasked with studying the body for 4-5 months now.

The source told me they were asking, “How did Lindsay get this information? This was not supposed to get out, was not supposed to be public knowledge. No one on the outside knows about this. Where is Lindsay getting his information?”

Therefore, we can say that now sources inside the Dyer team seem to be confirming the story that it is being held in a government research lab near Vegas and that a government team has been studying the body.

New David Durrett chart on the Rick Dyer story. Here is another fine Durrett chart showing how folks are projecting in the Dyer story. To be honest, a lot of us are projecting in a similar way about the Sierra Kills story, especially the body recovery part. If you are going to do detective work of any sort, you more or less need to project.

Fine chart shows how Dyer detractors are projecting away in their case.

One of Dyer’s investors may be Australian billionaire Clive Palmer. On his radio show, Rick said that one of his investors was the guy who was building the Titanic II for 2016 ship. It’s not known if Palmer owns Hank or a part of Hank, but somehow apparently Palmer has wormed his way into some sort of ownership of Hank.

Why won’t Dyer release Hank? Because Hank is not his to release! Apparently Dyer was a contract employee of Minnow Films at the time Hank was shot, and therefore, Dyer cannot release Hank’s body without somehow coordinating it with Minnow. On the other hand though, Hank himself belongs to Rick and his investors. The movie is Minnow’s, and Hank is Dyer and his investors’. Dyer and his investors + Minnow are running the show.

Dyer stole at least $50,000 as a part of his Bigfoot hoax in 2008. Dyer brags that he “made” $650,000 off of his 2008 Bigfoot hoax. Shows you just what kind of a human being he is that he would brag about cleaning up after a case of fraud. Con artists are sociopaths as a good general rule. Hell, most used car salesmen are controlled sociopaths of one sort or another.

Rick’s a con artist. It’s what he does. On the other hand, he also engages in legitimate employment ventures where he doesn’t even rip people off at all. So he’s honest sometimes, and other time’s he’s not. He’s a vicious maniac sometimes going after his enemies, and he’s warm and charming to his friends.

He’s a guiltless thief and con man, but he craves redemption for his “sins” in the 2008 hoax. Although probably more than absolving sin he is looking to clear his name of mud and receive approval and accolades instead of being universally reviled. Anyway, most pure sociopaths don’t care whether you like them or not. It’s the narcissist who seeks approval. Hence, the narcissistic sociopath moniker.

What to make of it? As my mother would say, “Well…people are complicated.”

Anyway, how much of the rest of that $650,000 was stolen money? Steve Kulls has confirmed for me that $50,000 of that at least was simply out and out stolen money. The rest? Who knows! It’s illegal to profit from fraud in the US, but a DA has to file charges, and none ever did. I know who got their $50,000 ripped off (another Bigfoot hoaxer and con artist) and apparently they decided not to press charges. As far as I can tell, Dyer has been stealing money off and on for the last five years or so.

California Department of Fish and Game (DFG) officials may have seized some of Justin Smeja’s Bigfoot samples. A source of mine who works in a museum told me:

“The CDFG seized a lot of Justin’s Bigfoot samples when they came to his house [that day in November 2011]. It’s a good thing he had more stashed around [possibly in multiple freezers within a 25 mile radius of Sacramento, California] or he would really be screwed!”

This is different from the Standard Narrative that states that the CDFG came to Justin’s house, and Justin would not let them in because they did not have a warrant. They said they would go back to get a warrant, and they never came back. The CDFG officers supposedly said:

“We are here to investigate the killing of a Sasquatch in the Sierra Nevadas in October 2010.”

Then another officer said: “Wait! You were not supposed to tell him that…”

I asked my source about the discrepancy, and he said that the Standard Story is a lie, and the true story is what he told me about officers seizing samples.

I must reiterate that we still have no good hard evidence that DFG officers seized Justin’s samples that day – we only have rumors.

Justin Smeja and Derek Randles appear on TV show. Very nice TV show aired around April 1. They recreated the Sierra Kills (not very well I think), and they used actors instead of using Justin and the driver (lame). And they didn’t do the body recovery scene. All in all though, it was a job well done. My hits starting going high after that show (searches for “Bigfoot killed in the Sierra Nevada”), and it was around then that I got two TV offers in one day. I downloaded the show (45 minutes out of a 1.5 hour show), but haven’t uploaded it to my video site yet. Link to the show is here.

Dead Bigfoot, the movie, to be released soon. Ro Sahebi’s documentary will be released soon. It will star Justin Smeja, Shawn of Bigfoot Evidence and Bart Cutino, among others. All of these folks are friends of mine. Ro makes some superb movies (better than many I see on TV), and this should be a nice movie. The movie, in case you didn’t guess, is about the Sierra Kills. It will also show footage of Bart shooting thermal video of several Bigfoots at the Sierra Kills site recently.

New allegation about the Sierra Kills. A source says that Justin and the driver did not shoot those Bigfoots as described. Instead, they were shot at some sort of a feeding setup in a baited trap. They waited for the Bigfoots to come eat and then shot them.

“Smeja and Randles are full of shit on the account of this shooting. Bigfoot don’t throw their hands up and walk towards a guy with a gun. They exit stage left in super human speed. These guys were shot at some feeding setup more than likely from a blind of some sort,” the source said.

The source is regarded as a “fringe” type in the Bigfoot scene, and I don’t believe his theory of how Justin shot his Bigfoots. Justin’s shooting story is accurate.

Video implies that Justin is lying in his Sierra Kills interview with Ro Sahebi. This video, by someone who worked in corporate America for years, says that his investigative skills show that Justin is lying in the video. Justin may well have been lying about a few things, but I think at least the basic story of the Kills itself is true, at least up until the body recovery part, at which point things start to become much more inconclusive.

I do not believe that the person who made this video, Midnight Walker, has proven his case about Justin, and at any rate, he is regarded as a fringe player in the Bigfoot scene by many for various reasons.

My story about Adrian Erickson’s documentary being sold to National Geographic apparently confirmed. This media outlet, River Journal out of Idaho, has now confirmed my rumor that Erickson’s documentary has been sold to National Geographic TV and has added to the rumor by saying that Nat Geo paid a rumored 7 figure sum for the movie. I also reported that Melba Ketchum has been working with Erickson and Nat Geo on this same documentary. It appears that Erickson never sold out to Melba – instead he just sold some rights to her.

And Erickson is now walking away with over $1 million+ (!) for his documentary. This will go a long ways towards paying his bills. A source  who works in Hollywood told me that Erickson would never make back the $3 million he spent on his movie, and that instead, he would only maybe get $150,000 because as he told me, “There is no money in TV.” He appears to be wrong. So Erickson has recouped 1/3 of the money he spent on the movie. Erickson seems to be doing a lot better financially these days, and he is off leading hunts again. He has a website set up for leading hunts.

The article also says that the team the Erickson Project filmed was the 9 foot tall male, his partner, Matilda, a 7 foot tall female, and an unknown juvenile. This does not line up with what I had heard before, but it may be true. The previous story was that there was the large male, his female partner, and Matilda, their daughter, who later become pregnant and had a child in the course of the study.

In addition, the article says for the first time that there have been rumors for years that the EP managed to put GPS tracking devices on the Bigfoots at Crittenden. If this is so, then why can’t these Bigfoots be tracked now?

Problems with Ketchum DNA study. Ketchum is not allowing replication of her data from her Bigfoot DNA study. I am not sure what this means, but Bart Cutino says that Melba is not allowing others to replicate her data. That may mean that she is not allowing them to see her samples so they can work on them themselves or possibly she is not releasing all of her data.

In addition, the three genomes that Ketchum claims line up very well have been tested by other scientists who actually found that they did not line up very well at all.

Ketchum accused of ripping off Wally Hersom. Bart Cutino is accusing Melba Ketchum, who recently published her findings on Bigfoot DNA, of more or less ripping off Wally Hersom, the billionaire inventor who was financially backing her study. According to Cutino, Wally’s money was only supposed to go for testing samples and for nothing else. Now whether there was to be a living stipend in there or not has not been confirmed.

However, Melba spent that money on all sorts of things – fancy clothes, fancy meals at restaurants, fancy vacations to Europe, on and on – all on Wally’s dime. Wally’s money apparently was not intended for all of these frivolous expenses. Also, according to Cutino, when Melba was on the phone to Justin one time, she encouraged Justin to ask Wally for $15,000 for something that should not have cost not much of any money at all. Justin would pocket $10,000, and Melba would pocket $5,000.

When Justin asked if this was not stealing, Melba replied, “Oh well, don’t worry. Wally has lots of money.”

Whatever you can say about Justin, he’s not avaricious at all, and he’s not a ripoff or a thief. Justin was appalled and reported this to Bart. According to both of them, Melba was more or less ripping off Wally for a long time. Boy, these holier than thou fundamentalist Christians sure know how to sin it up, don’t they?

Melba’s foundation has been set up as profit making enterprise. Ketchum’s Sasquatch Protection Group has been set up for the expressed purpose of making money and for no other purpose. So much for good intentions.

Ketchum cheered when Richard Stubstad died. I have been wondering for some time now if this woman is a controlled sociopath of some sort, and this just adds fuel to the fire. Richard was one of my best friends, and this doesn’t sit too well with me. Oh well, no matter. US capitalism churns out controlled sociopaths like an assembly line at a factory.

My beef with Ketchum. The main thing I have against this woman is that she has done more than any other person to bring greed into this Bigfoot business. Not that it hasn’t always been there, but she took it to a whole new level. Money’s the root of all evil, and greed is screwing up this business the same way it ruins everything else. Sure, Greed is her middle name but still.

David Paulides’ shenanigans with the Smith River submitter in Del Norte County, California. The Smith River submitter, possibly Kirk Stewart, has a positive Bigfoot sample into Ketchum’s DNA study. This is the fellow who was making the news when an apparent Bigfoot was stealing pheasants from his chicken coop and eating his watermelons.

Paulides, one of the nastiest and least liked fellows in Bigfootery, got involved with this fellow and sleazed out in classic sleazy Paulides fashion. Paulides and the submitter had a big falling when the submitter figured out that Paulides was trying to steal all the guy’s samples. Classic Paulides move.

Paulides’ background. Everyone I talk to about Paulides has nothing good to say about him. Even the folks who won’t bash him to his face are afraid of him. A source with Paulides’ group NABS told me that Paulides’ temper is legendary and that the other group members all lived in fear of his raging temper. Obviously someone like this was meant by God to be Ketchum’s great and good friend. A perfect match, one piece of work with another, that could only be made in Heaven.

Paulides was a police officer on a Bay Area police force, possibly the Palo Alto Police Department. He was fired for engaging in fraud by using city government stationary to solicit money for some charity that he was running. For this reason, he was forced to resign as a police officer.

He had previously embroiled himself in a police brutality scandal. What happened was that Paulides, a detective, was badly beaten up by a suspect. As revenge, Paulides got a bunch of his plainclothes buddies to go out on a mission to find the guy who beat up Paulides (the suspect was out of jail by now) and deliver some paybacks.

The man who beat up Paulides was badly beaten up by Paulides’ detective friends as payback. Word got out about it, and it was a great big mess with newspaper write-ups and the whole nine yards. I sympathize with Paulides for getting beaten up by a criminal and for wanting revenge, but after all, this is a society that operates on the rule of law.

Old video of Iowa Bigfoot seems to be a hoax. A family in Iowa, a mother, father and kids, films a Bigfoot in Iowa. Some breakdowns have apparently confirmed this as a hoax. Here is a photo from the video below.

This is apparently a hoax, but I think at the very least I believe it is a pretty good one. I didn’t think an older couple with little kids would be so scummy as to hoax a Bigfoot video, but I guess I was wrong!

Shout out to Bigfoot Buzz. Chuck Prahl’s Bigfoot Buzz site is one of the best Bigfoot sites out there. He updates it all the time, and it’s amazing how many stories he keeps up on. He has an excellent tone and doesn’t condescend to mud-slinging and smack talking like everyone else does. He stays out of most of the Bigfoot wars and doesn’t take sides too often, which is the only smart thing to do in this biz. It’s just good journalism – get the story out and only the story, and screw the rest.

It takes a somewhat credulous tone, which is proper for the subject. I get tired of these “everything is a hoax” folks. On the other hand, he readily calls out hoaxes when he sees them.

Chuck has long had a fine Bigfoot radio show out of the Chesapeake Bay, Maryland, and he is a fine radio announcer.

Interview with me on Mind Cemetery radio. Not sure how many of you Bigfoot News readers saw this, but I recently did an interview with a Net radio station called Mind Cemetery that was also broadcasted on a dial radio station out of New Orleans. This is the first time I have ever been on dial radio.

The interview lasts 2 hours, and the sound quality is bad at times. I am told I have a good voice though. Well, women like it at least. I am an introvert, and I am always afraid to listen to my interviews. The links sit there for ages on my desk while I send my friends around to listen to them. Then I ask them how I sounded. They keep telling me I sound great. Finally I get up the nerve to listen to the interview.

Three Bigfoot Forums posters with samples in to Dr. Melba Ketchum’s study. The three posters are Sasfooty, Indiefoot and Southernyahoo. Sasfooty at least has some odd stories. I believe this woman claims that Bigfoots come into her yard and stand there and smoke cigarettes while staring at her house! No way! Anyway, go to Melba’s Sasquatch Genome Project page and run through the list of submitters, and see if you can figure out who they are. I don’t like any of the three, but I hardly like anyone of BFF.

BFF scumbags link me to known Bigfoot kook and release my IP address to other BFF members. On a BFF post, a member stated that Jon-Erik Beckjord and I had been identified as such persistent trolls that our IP addresses were released to other BFF members as some sort of security measure. Beckjord was a notorious Bigfoot kook and disruptor who made enemies of everyone and had the most insane theories about Bigfoot. He was widely hated. I think he died recently.

Just shows you what scumbags these BFF guys are. All BFF threads about and links to me are deleted at BFF. These idiots are the biggest losers in the business. I have no idea where all of this insane spite comes from, but it sure is weird. Any ideas?

Why I use the word “sources.” I am actually a trained journalist. I have a BA degree in Journalism from J-school, and I used to work as an editor of a magazine. We use words like that all the time. Anyway, investigative reporters don’t like to identify folks who have not gone public.

Bison, Cattle and the Great Plains/Rocky Mountains

I got this from Defenders of Wildlife. I have no idea why these idiot cattle ranchers in Montana hate buffalo so much. Does anyone have any ideas?

I have a feeling that it might have to do with brucellosis. It is true that bison do have brucellosis, and theoretically they could transmit it to cattle. Cattle can be devastated by brucellosis. However, to my knowledge, there has not yet been a single case of bison to cattle brucellosis transmission. Apparently bison need to have very close contact with cattle to transmit the disease, and that just does not happen in the wild. It might occur in a zoo or game farm or some artificial environment where you threw the animals together.

I understand at least as of 15-20 years ago, there were parts of the northern Great Plains that were actually losing population in many areas of the states. I think especially of North Dakota and South Dakota. Some counties are nearly hanging up the Going out Business sign as the number of residents goes too low to support county services. Some towns have become virtual ghost towns. Many of the remaining are elderly people living alone. There are many abandoned old homes in some of these counties. If you have the guts, you can poke around these old homes. They still have a lot of period furniture, old clothes, old books, old lamps and other accessories. Wild animals are now reclaiming a lot of these old homes and you will often ferret them out when you go into these old houses.

I am not sure what the depopulation is all about. Does anyone have any ideas?

Anyway, I believe that what we ought to do in these depopulated areas is have the state condemn the land and buy it out. Then run bison on it or allow private bison ranchers to lease the land and run bison on it. Or sell it to bison farmers so they can run bison on it. If no one wants to run bison on the land, you can open it up to private harvest by hunters or you can lease use of it to private bison harvesting concerns so they can harvest the bison and ship it to slaughterhouses for packaging to consumers.

Bison is said to taste a lot like beef but it is very much better for you. The Plains Indians lived on bison meat for millenia and there was little evidence of any harm to them from this diet. Bison meat is very lean and low fat.

In particular, the Great Plains evolved with bison! There is a whole ecosystem that has been almost completely destroyed out there with the elimination of the bison. Prairie dogs and the black footed ferret are two of those that have been hit the hardest. The black footed ferret was nearly driven to extinction, mostly by extermination campaigns waged by cattle ranchers against prairie dogs. Cattlemen slaughter prairie dogs because they say that stupid cows trip over their prairie dog burrows and the dogs compete with cows for forage.

As you can tell, I have an extremely low opinion of cattle ranchers! However, they do have some potential. Perhaps we could allow ranchers who agree not to exterminate everything that is not a cow on their land to charge a lower price for their beef. Call it “endangered species beef.” Even better yet, hit those ranchers who will not undertake these measures with a tax that raises the price of their beef by maybe 10% above the conservationist ranchers. The good ranchers would be allowed to sell for cheaper and slap a pro-environment label on their beef. This is a sort of a market friendly regulation that I like, but as you can see, it still involves government regulation, taxation and so on. But carrot and stick approaches are usually nice.

It’s the latest threat to wild bison conservation.

All we have worked for could be severely compromised if a batch of bad bison bills passes through Montana’s state legislature. Some of Montana’s most extreme anti-wildlife legislators are attempting to make restoration of wild bison to the Great Plains nearly impossible.

A Massive Assault on Bison

The worst of the bills, SB 143, would:

• Order Montana officials to “immediately” kill or remove all wild bison migrating into Montana;
• Prohibit wild bison relocation anywhere in Montana except to the National Bison Range – where wild bison are already located;
• Establish a bison hunt “statewide and at any time of the year;” and
• Allow landowners to shoot wild bison on private land.

To add insult to injury:

• SB 256 would make Montana’s wildlife agency liable for any property damage from wild bison, a precedent meant to financially prohibit bison restoration;
• SB 341 would require Montana’s wildlife agency to navigate a massive list of additional hurdles prior to relocation of any wildlife species and prohibit relocation if the species could impact livestock grazing, clearly intended to prevent bison relocation; and
• HB 396 would attempt to give county commissioners veto power over bison restoration within their counties – even on tribal lands and our federal public lands.

Our Plan for Bison

Defenders of Wildlife’s Rockies and Plains team is working overtime to turn back this cruel assault on bison recovery.

We’re working with a diverse coalition of tribes and conservation organizations to testify against these bills and mobilize opposition; we’re getting word out to the media to bring attention to these bills; and we’re organizing Montanans to show up at the Montana capitol, make phone calls and send emails to exert grassroots pressure on legislators and the governor.

Our efforts are beginning to pay off. Three of the eight anti-bison bills are now dead. But five more remain a threat to wild bison in Montana — and we need your help more than ever to continue this critical work.

Last year, we helped relocate 61 pure wild bison from Yellowstone National Park to the Fort Peck Indian Reservation. It was the start of an historic effort to restore Yellowstone bison to key places in the Great Plains – an effort that is now in jeopardy, unless we can turn back this latest assault. Please help today!

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 November 27, 2012

“THEY’VE GOT THE BODIES!” Those of you following the famous Sierra Kills story often wonder what happened to the bodies of the two Bigfoots that were killed at Mt. Haskell, California, in the Sierra Nevadas on that cold and fateful fall day on October 10, 2010. Many have expressed disbelief that one or more of the bodies were not recovered on that day or on later trips to the site.

I can now report that no less an authority than Bobo Fay himself has said that two bodies were indeed retained from the Sierra Kills aftermath at some point, either on that day or most probably later.

About 8-9 months ago, Bobo was at a Finding Bigfoot meeting for the show he is starring in. Someone asked him about the Sierra Kills and asked why no bodies were retrieved from the site.

“No!” Bobo replied. “You don’t understand! They’ve got the bodies!”

This means that according to Bobo, both bodies from the Kills were retained at some point and are apparently being kept locked away somewhere for safekeeping.

According to the official story, Justin Smeja did not go back to the site until 3-4 weeks later when there was several feet of snow on the ground. After a day of digging through the snow, about 2 pounds of Bigfoot flesh was recovered. It was thought that this was from the adult male Bigfoot.

However, Scott Sandsberry, a reporter for the Yakima Herald newspaper, wrote a multipart series on Bigfoot last year. He conducted many interviews with all of the big players in the Bigfoot world. In the article about the Kills, Sandsberry stated unequivocally that after the Kills and before the digging in the snow trip, Smeja went back to the site “with a prominent Bigfoot researcher.” Note that this expedition has been elided from the traditional narrative.

In addition, Derek Randles states that he did not have the time or money to go back to the Kills site until 8 months later. But this cannot be true. Randles stated soon after he learned of the Kills, “We have a team ready to go down there tomorrow.” Apparently the expedition to the Kills site would be funded by Wally Hersom.

Bobo has made other hints that bodies were retained. In a recent episode of Conan O’Brien, Bobo was asked about the Sierra Kills. Bobo said, “The whole investigation is centered around those bodies.” This implies that both bodies were retained and are being used in the study somehow.

In addition, on the Joe Rogan Show, Bobo was asked by Rogan if the bodies had been retained from the Sierra Kills. Bobo hesitated for a few seconds, and his jaw seemed to drop. He started to say something, but then he stopped. He asked Rogan, “Um, can I talk to you after the show?” Rogan said sure. Then Bobo launched into a spiel about how no bodies had been retained.

As we can see, Bobo has implied on two occasions and openly stated on the third that bodies were retained from the Kills.

Obviously the bodies, if they exist, have been squirreled away somewhere. So who has them? I and my fellow investigators do not believe that either Smeja or Randles has the bodies. If anybody has them, it is probably Wally Hersom.

Why were the bodies squirreled away? If they exist, we think that the bodies may have been hidden in part to preserve Ketchum’s study. After all, revelation of the bodies would have killed Ketchum’s study once and for all by showing it up. So the bodies were secreted away so she could be the first to discover Bigfoot. After all, a race is on now, similar to the race to be the first to find HIV in the 1980′s. Then as now, many people want to be the first.

Another possibility is that Ketchum has a Hollywood publicist and a Hollywood lawyer working for her. These are very shrewd folks. They may have figured out that having Ketchum’s study associated with something as gruesome as the Kills, with two whole dead bodies, including a juvenile, horribly enough, was deadly for the study.

As one of my fellow researchers said, “They probably figured that those bodies were Kryptonite for her study!”

So in order to make something of the Kills, they sawed off a slice of the thigh of the adult male as a sample and stashed away the rest.

Assuming they exist, will the bodies ever see the light of day? No one knows. They may be hidden away forever, or they may end up being sold mysteriously to some millionaire in China.

Perhaps when things blow over and a deal of non-prosecution is signed for Smeja, they could somehow be revealed.

On the other hand, many players have insisted that no bodies were retained from the Kills. If the bodies later show up, they will be revealed as shame-faced liars. Derek Randles said, no doubt revealing his deepest fears, “I don’t want to be known as the guy who hid the bodies!” Sure he doesn’t.

But if they ever turn up, millions of fingers will point to him, and he will have a lot of ‘splainin to do. Randles and others’ reputations may be shot and may not recover. Any existing bodies may well serve best hidden away for a very long time.

Sierra Kills bodies may be used by Ketchum Project to determine which relict hominid Bigfoot is. I reported a while back that the Ketchum team was looking at a certain relict hominid known in the scientific record, and this is what they think the Bigfoots are. After I reported that, all Hell broke loose in the Ketchum camp, and a spy hunt ensued. Many people were thrown out of her Sasquatch Protection Group as possible spies. Clearly, that’s a sensitive issue with her.

However, how can it possibly make sense that they have a certain relict hominid, known to science, in mind? I know for a fact that they are comparing the Bigfoots to a known relict hominid documented in the scientific record.

There are only two ways they could have one in mind. One, via DNA. However, DNA has already ruled out Denisova and Neandertal, and those are the only two relict hominids that we have DNA for.

The only other way is by comparing skeletons or skulls. In order to do that, Ketchum must have access to Bigfoot body(ies), skull(s) or skeleton(s). I have no knowledge that Ketchum has access to any of those. Except, that is, for the Kills, which she may well have access to.

If she has access to the bodies from the Kills, they can look at those bodies and compare them with skeletons and skulls in museum collections. Once again, I figure Ketchum must have access to the Kills bodies in order to have a known relict hominid to compare the Bigfoots to.

I asked a deeply connected source that very question.

“If they can’t compare the Bigfoots to other hominids by DNA, then is the Ketchum team using Bigfoot body(ies), skull(s) or skeleton(s) to compare the Bigfoots to known museum specimens?”

My source turned oddly silent.

“I’m not going to answer that question,” he said darkly.

There you have it.

All Hell has broken loose with the revelation of the results from Dr. Melba Ketchum’s Bigfoot DNA study. One of the many questions is that if it is still in peer review, why did she issue a press release? In my opinion, the paper has been sitting in peer review in the US for 21 months.

For 7 of those months, I believe it was at Henry Gee’s Nature. It was handed back by Nature due to “no testable hypothesis” and lack of a zoologist on board.

For the next 14 months, it has been sitting at one or more US journals. It has gone through four major rewrites and many minor ones. I think that finally Ketchum has just given up on US journals and has decided instead simply to publish abroad, in this case in Russia.

Hence the release by Igor Burtsev and the Ketchum release that followed. I figure that the paper has been under review at some journal that Burtsev is associated with, and it’s going to pass review at that journal as a foregone conclusion. She’s going to publish in a Russian scientific journal in both English and Russian.

Ruckus about “angel DNA.” Indeed early versions of the paper contained not only references to angel DNA but also the Nephilim. The Nephilim references at least were removed in an early version as being a sure paper-killer. Whether or not the “angel DNA” references were removed in later versions is not known. I would certainly hope so!

One wonders why the angel and Nephilim references? Well, this is simply what Ketchum believes. As a fundamentalist Christian from East Texas, she has believed from the very start after she discovered that the Bigfoots were real that they had to be the Nephilim, the giants of the Bible. According to Genesis, angels came down from the heavens and mated with human women, thereby creating the a race of giants, the Nephilim.

Ketchum has been working this Biblical angle of the story for a long time. This was a huge source of friction between her and the late, great Richard Stubstad. He told me that she kept trying to fit the Bigfoot story into her Biblical beliefs. Richard kept telling her to please knock it off, leave the religion alone and just focus on the science, but she would never drop the subject.

Also she kept trying to convert Richard, and this was starting to make him mad. This led to the famous fallout between the two great Bigfoot researchers.

As recently as November 2011, I heard that the Ketchum study still had a strong fundamentalist Christian bent to it. Whether this was revealed in the actual paper itself is not known.

Ketchum made a strange admission in her press release about non-human, non relict hominid and non-ape DNA in the nuclear side of the Bigfoots. Non-human, non relict hominid and non-ape? What is it then? Wombat DNA? I wish I had an answer to this question, but I am as baffled as anyone else is. And I am fully aware that as worded, this scenario makes no sense whatsoever.

Mystery about DNA anomalies in the Bigfoot nuclear DNA. Apparently ~80% of the nuclear DNA is either human or in the hominid line. However the rest, 20% of it, cannot be found in any known DNA database, so Ketchum insisted on calling it “angel DNA.” Ketchum’s contention is that in the distant past, aliens, (the 20%) mated with man to produce a species of hybrid that they could use as workers here on Earth.

This is the “Annunaki” story that the UFO folks are so enamored of. Ketchum also contends that in order to keep their species as it currently exists, the Bigfoots need to mate with human females occasionally (this is the Mars Needs Women or King Kong scenario).

You will see similarities between Ketchum’s thinking and the book The Twelfth Planet by Z. Sitchen. Wally Hersom is said to love that book, and he encourages everyone he knows to read it.

I haven’t the faintest idea of any of this insanity is true, and for all I know, Ketchum may well be correct. The problem is that the theory is so over the top that obviously no serious US journal will publish it.

Wally Hersom was very upset at the paper when it was written up like this, even though he also is deeply invested in the “Bigfoots are aliens” theory. He felt that no journal on Earth would publish such a paper, and consequently he would see no return on his $200,000 he invested in the project.

In addition, Wally is still bound by an NDA with Ketchum so he can’t talk about any of this. Not only that, but he’s out $200,000. He thinks he got screwed, he’s mad as Hell, and he can’t even talk to anyone about it.

Wally Hersom is not a young man. He is actually over 80 years old, though he doesn’t look it at all. One wonders whether he is going to demand a return on his investment or whether he will just cut his losses and call it a day.

In addition to Hersom and Ketchum, David Paulides has long been telling everyone who will listen that Bigfoots are part alien. According to him, the Bigfoot nuclear DNA “goes back 30,000 years, and then it stops.” According to Paulides, that means the male line of the Bigfoots is from outer space. Paulides is also a deeply religious fundamentalist Christian.

Is Melba Ketchum nuts? I have been following this woman for a long time now. It’s true that she is a deeply religious fundamentalist Christian. However, that’s not in the DSM yet.

I do not see any evidence of mental instability in Ketchum. True, since she started habituating Bigfoots at her leased property in the region, she has had a lot of interesting and very unusual experiences.

But this is typical for habituators. Once people start investigating Bigfoots so deeply that they are in regular contact with them, all sorts of strange things start happening to them. To an outsider, it looks like the person has gone off the deep end, but I doubt it.

What I think happens is that when you are around Bigfoots a lot, you start experiencing a lot of the “something else” that many researchers talk about. This is the strange paranormal side of the Bigfoots. Perhaps they use infrasound to disorient folks. Perhaps they have psi or ESP abilities. There are all manner of odd reports. I haven’t the faintest idea of what exactly is going on, but I do think there is something paranormal about these Bigfoots.

Ketchum’s Bigfoot rape was not an actual rape. As I reported earlier to much condemnation, Ketchum claimed that she thought she had been raped by a Bigfoot. She went out to her pasture, had some sort of a lost time event, woke a couple of hours later after being unconscious and felt sore in her vaginal area.

I have now learned that she was fully clothed the whole time and wearing jeans. There is no way that a Bigfoot took her jeans off, raped her and then replaced them. Forget it. It now turns out that Ketchum does not think she was actually raped. Instead she was somehow “mind-raped” by a Bigfoot. I suppose that’s possible somehow (don’t ask me how), but it sure as Hell is weird.

Sierra Kills driver’s name is Jack Evans. I can now reveal the name of Justin Smeja’s driver on the Sierra Kills. Ro Sahebi recently did a nice interview with this young man, but Jack’s face was hidden. Jack’s first name has been released sporadically, but this is the first time his last name has been released. I figure Jack is a famous person now, a public figure. He chooses to go by the name of Jack Evans, so I will report that fact. He does live in the Sacramento area, near Smeja. I know more about him, but I won’t reveal it because it’s not important, and it’s basically private.

Robin Lynne, Ketchum’s new spokesperson, is a fruitcake. I told you above that people seem to go nuts when they start habituating these Bigfoots. Well this is surely true about Robin Lynne, a woman who lives deep in the woods in Michigan and claims to have a group of ~10 Bigfoots residing in and around her property. She feeds them fish, water, blueberry bagels, muffins and other goodies every day.

The truth is that other than her own assertions, Lynne has not provided the slightest bit of evidence that there are any Bigfoots at all on her property. People have stayed at her house, but they didn’t see any Bigfoots. Apparently Bigfoot doesn’t like to have his picture taken, so there are no photos. In addition, she has not provided us with any other evidence of their existence.

Lynne also says she communicates regularly with the Bigfoots via Mindspeak somehow. This certainly begs ridicule. How is she able to communicate with these Bigfoots? Do they speak English? I don’t get it.

The Science Blogosphere has gone nuts, literally, with the revelation of the Bigfoot study. There has been much ridicule of the Ketchum report all around, including, shamefully enough, by a number of famous youngish male scientists and journalists. I will single out Carl Zimmer, John D. Hawks, Lee R. Berger, Ben Hammersley, Greg Laden, and a number of others too numerous to even bother to track down.

Actually the behavior of these men is not unusual, and most of the female scientists and science writers are taking a similar line. The science crowd speaks with one voice.

Please do not write to any of these scofftics offering to clear up any questions they have about Ketchum’s paper. I already did that, and it was a great unpleasant big waste of time. They don’t want to hear any news, and frankly they are snide and hostile when you discuss it with them. Their minds are made up, and they don’t want to be confused with any facts. There’s no point discussing this paper or Bigfoot in general with any of these characters.

Much of the strutting, cavorting Heckl and Jeckl narcissism, overblown egotism and sheer, utter arrogance can be viewed here on Berger’s reprobate Twitter feed, where he and his jerky friends make complete idiots out of themselves falling all over each other trying to ridicule the notion of Bigfoots.

Berger even arrogantly offered $10,000, while his guffawing pals egged him on, to anyone who could prove that Ketchum was a real scientist and either prove Bigfoot’s existence or provide evidence of Bigfoot DNA. I wrote this swaggering clown and offered for Smeja and I to sell him a good sized piece of the Sierra Kills Bigfoot steak for the $10K. He wasn’t having any of it. Turns it he’s not going to part with his 10 grand after all. Disgusting. And wussy.

Many of these arrogant 35-50 year old swellhead males are paleontologists. Others are science journalists. Some are anthropologists, and others are biologists. Just the usual douchebags with PhD’s, egos big as baby universes.

Their behavior is disgusting and pitiful and reminds of why I am so sickened by mainstream science, which is truly a dead end fundamentalist belief system no different from a religion anymore. It pains me to say that Dr. Jeff Meldrum is one of the last true scientists on Earth. Isn’t that sad?

The scientists have been joined by other science writers such as professional scofftics Benjamin Radford and Sharon Hill of I Doubt It. The problem here is that Radford and Hill try to have it both ways.

For a long time now, Radford, Hill, the JREF crowd and many other science writers have openly and belligerently chortled that there is simply no such thing as Bigfoot. Again and again, they have ridiculed and thrown verbal missiles at anyone idiotic enough to even look for these creatures to try to study them.

The line is that Bigfoots obviously don’t exist, so there’s no need for science to investigate the matter since their nonexistence was settled long ago. In other words, they screech, this is a matter that should not even be studied. Those who dare to venture out to study these creatures are subjected to the worst harassment. Meldrum’s colleagues at Idaho State University have repeatedly tried to get him fired for having the temerity to study Bigfoot.

Radford and Hill are particularly degenerate in that they are scofftics posing as skeptics.

While they viciously attack anyone with their nerve to investigate this question, they somehow, nervously, often leave themselves an out now and again so that, if Bigfoots are ever discovered, as they obviously will be soon, they will be able to redeem themselves as open minded skeptics while the rest of the science crowd is eating crow, wiping the egg off their faces and generally being utterly humiliated.

The interesting scientist/writer Zen Faulkes takes a predictably snide approach like that of almost all his colleagues, but after I emailed him, he seemed to tone it down a bit towards the end of this then-updated post. Faulkes complains that the paper has not been peer reviewed yet, but then he says it never should have been sent out for review in the first place. That is, the public doesn’t have a right to evaluate this data.

After I informed him that no less a giant than Henry Gee apparently had the paper on his desk for 7 months, Faulkes seemed to tone it down. At the moment, he’s taking an exemplary approach to the matter, a properly open minded one.

Do the scientists even care that they are all about to be totally and utterly humiliated? Of course, those of us who are certain that Bigfoots exist (I personally would bet my life on it) know that soon they will be proven to exist by some dramatic evidence of one sort or another.

The scofftic scientists will kick and scream like mules no matter what evidence we uncover (I suspect even a body won’t be enough for them), but sooner or later, it is the nature of empiricism itself that all existing and readily proven truths will be revealed, and sooner rather than later.

With the Bigfoots, as John Bindernagel recently said, we seem to be reaching a critical mass of evidence, a tipping point. This is correct. At some point, the evidence will become overwhelming, and the immature defense of reactive denial will no longer suffice.

Will any of these paragons of ultra-arrogant science eat their words and say they were sorry? I do not think so. Prideful science is as it does; it will continue to strut about sociopathically without a glimmer or hint of guilt or contrition in its eye.

A “know it all” never admits he is wrong, nor does he feel bad when his lies are shown up, and the mirror reveals a fool. The proud apologize for nothing and never feel bad. Overbearing science will strut on, ready to mount the barricades of the next failing paradigm as the waves of truth slowly batter it away with the tides. But the fortress of ignorance and tradition must not fail.

Robin Lynne has no sample in the Ketchum study. The scofftic crowd is referencing my article to misread it to state that Robin Lynne has a sample in to Ketchum’s study, and it’s that sample that the study is based on. This is not correct. Lynne has no sample in to the study.

Kitikaze of JREF faked the Elba River trackway. According to posters on Bigfoot Forums, the hoaxer who hoaxed the Elba River fake Bigfoot prints in Washington State recently was none other than Kitikaze, notorious scofftic from JREF forums. Another notorious scofftic poster is suspected of assisting this turkey in his nefarious deeds. It’s bad enough that these dips are scofftics, but now they are hoaxing? Good God, how depraved can you get?

Pennsylvania Bigfoot video. The video below was recently released to much scorn. However, I do feel that this may in fact be an actual Bigfoot in the film, although it’s hard to make it out well. There are certain things about it that most hoaxers don’t get right. Slowed down and enhanced by Phil Poling.

Bigfoot News Thanksgiving Edition, 2012

Dr. Melba Ketchum Bigfoot DNA study getting ready for the big reveal? Igor Burtsev released the following blurb on his Facebook page the other day, which set off a storm of speculation:

“International Center of Hominology (Russia)
Urgent!

The DNA analysis of the Bigfoot/Sasquatch specimen conducted by Dr. Melba Ketchum the head of DNA Diagnostics, Timpson, TX, USA has been over!

Team of American scientists led by Dr. Melba Ketchum for five years has analyzed 109 purported samples of such creatures. The study has sequenced DNA of a novel North American hominin, commonly called Bigfoot or Sasquatch.

There were a large number of laboratories associated with this study including academic, private and government laboratories in which blind testing was utilized to avoid prejudice in testing. Great time and care was taken in the forensic laboratories to assure no contamination occurred with any of the samples utilized in this study.

After 5 years of this study the scientists can finally answer the question of what Sasquatch really is. It is human like us only different, a hybrid of a human with unknown species. Early field research shows that the Bigfoot/Sasquatches are massively intelligent which has enabled them to avoid detection to a large extent. They are different than us, however human nonetheless.

The hybridization event could not have occurred more than 15,000 years ago according to the mitochondrial data in some samples. Origin of this hominin was probably Middle Eastern/Eastern Europe and Europe originally though other geographic areas are not excluded.

The manuscript associated with this study has been submitted to a scientific reviewed magazine.

For years people have refused to believe they exist. Now that we know that they are real, it is up to us to protect them from those that would hunt or try to capture them for research or for sport. They should be left alone to live as they live now. After all, they are our relatives.

At this time, analysis of the Sasquatch genomes is still ongoing. Further data will be presented in the future following this original study. Additionally, analysis of various hair samples purportedly from Siberian Wildman are being tested in an effort to determine if relatedness exists between the Sasquatch and Russian Wildman.

Dr. Igor Burtsev,
Head of International Center of Hominology,
Moscow, Russia +7(916)812-6253
inhomin@yandex.ru “

This was followed soon after by a Ketchum statement saying that she would elaborate on Burtsev’s statement. A couple of days later, Ketchum released the following her Facebook page, which then went out as a general press release.

‘BIGFOOT’ DNA SEQUENCED IN UPCOMING GENETICS STUDY

Five-Year Genome Study Yields Evidence of Homo sapiens/Unknown Hominin Hybrid Species in North America

DALLAS, Nov. 24–A team of scientists can verify that their 5-year long DNA study, currently under peer-review, confirms the existence of a novel hominin hybrid species, commonly called “Bigfoot” or “Sasquatch,” living in North America.

Researchers’ extensive DNA sequencing suggests that the legendary Sasquatch is a human relative that arose approximately 15,000 years ago as a hybrid cross of modern Homo sapiens with an unknown primate species.

The study was conducted by a team of experts in genetics, forensics, imaging and pathology, led by Dr. Melba S. Ketchum of Nacogdoches, TX. In response to recent interest in the study, Dr. Ketchum can confirm that her team has sequenced 3 complete Sasquatch nuclear genomes and determined the species is a human hybrid:

“Our study has sequenced 20 whole mitochondrial genomes and utilized next generation sequencing to obtain 3 whole nuclear genomes from purported Sasquatch samples. The genome sequencing shows that Sasquatch mtDNA is identical to modern Homo sapiens, but Sasquatch nuDNA is a novel, unknown hominin related to Homo sapiens and other primate species.

Our data indicate that the North American Sasquatch is a hybrid species, the result of males of an unknown hominin species crossing with female Homo sapiens.”

Hominins are members of the taxonomic grouping Hominini, which includes all members of the genus Homo. Genetic testing has already ruled out Homo neanderthalis and the Denisova hominin as contributors to Sasquatch mtDNA or nuDNA.

“The male progenitor that contributed the unknown sequence to this hybrid is unique as its DNA is more distantly removed from humans than other recently discovered hominins like the Denisovan individual,” explains Ketchum.

“Sasquatch nuclear DNA is incredibly novel and not at all what we had expected. While it has human nuclear DNA within its genome, there are also distinctly non-human, non-archaic hominin, and non-ape sequences. We describe it as a mosaic of human and novel non-human sequence. Further study is needed and is ongoing to better characterize and understand Sasquatch nuclear DNA.”

Ketchum is a veterinarian whose professional experience includes 27 years of research in genetics, including forensics. Early in her career she also practiced veterinary medicine, and she has previously been published as a participant in mapping the equine genome. She began testing the DNA of purported Sasquatch hair samples 5 years ago.

Ketchum calls on public officials and law enforcement to immediately recognize the Sasquatch as an indigenous people:

“Genetically, the Sasquatch are a human hybrid with unambiguously modern human maternal ancestry. Government at all levels must recognize them as an indigenous people and immediately protect their human and Constitutional rights against those who would see in their physical and cultural differences a ‘license’ to hunt, trap, or kill them.”

Full details of the study will be presented in the near future when the study manuscript publishes.

There is now a great deal of speculation about where and when the study will publish. A lot of folks are saying that it will publish in a Russian magazine and not in a real scientific journal, but that may be a misreading of Burtsev’s Russian press release. Burtsev is not a native English speaker, and his English may have been misinterpreted.

Ketchum’s spokesman seems to be Robin Lynne, a longtime Bigfoot habituator who lives in rural Michigan. She claims that there are up to 10 Bigfoots living around her property, and every day, she feeds them a variety of foods including Blueberry bagels, which they are particularly fond of. A lot of people have ridiculed her story, but according to information I have, there may indeed be Bigfoots on the property assuming some of the things she is relating are actually occurring.

For instance, one morning, Robin went out to her feeding box and found it locked! She heard noises inside, and when she opened it, the food was gone and there was an opossum inside!

She let the opossum out, but she was puzzled. Sure the possum could possibly have gotten into the box, but there is no way the possum could have gotten into the box and then locked the door to it afterwards. Shades of a locked room mystery here. Lynne concluded that the Bigfoots must have put the opossum into the box as a joke.

Burtsev is an associate of Lynne and has stayed at her place before. Burtsev released the initial PR release which Ketchum then relied upon. So Melba is in deep with Lynne, Burtsev and the rest of the Forest People crowd (Forest People is a group on Facebook). The Forest People group is widely ridiculed as being inhabited by Bigfoot kooks and idiots, but who knows? At this point, things are so insane in the Bigfoot world that anything is possible.

It is interesting that she has concluded that the hybridization event occurred not more than 15,000 YBP, and that it was a result of male subhumans breeding with female humans.

It is also interesting that both Neandertal and Denisova have been ruled out as the subhuman on the nuclear side. The report also says for the first time that the subhuman on the nuclear side is substantially more ancient than either Denisova or Neandertal.

As Denisova split from us 800,000 YBP, this means that the Bigfoot nuclear subhuman split from us before that. That leaves us possibly with Homo Erectus or one of his relatives like Homo Heidelbergensis.

This also means that a hominid more ancient than even Denisova was still roaming the Earth only 15,000 YBP. This is shocking, but it’s possible, as Homo Floresiensis was also roaming the Earth 13,000 YBP, and Flores Man is quite a bit more ancient than Denisova. Dr. Jeff Meldrum also states that we have a Homo Heidelbergensis skull from China from only 12,000 YBP.

Perhaps the most bizarre aspect of the report is that Bigfoots have DNA on the nuclear side that is non-human, non-hominin, and non-ape. This, frankly, makes not the slightest bit of sense at all, but it lines up with what we have been hearing for a long time now.

For forever now, David Paulides has been telling people that the nuclear subhuman component of the Bigfoots is from aliens. He says they “can only trace it back 30,000 YBP, and then it stops.” This apparently means that the Bigfoot nuclear subhuman came from outer space. Wally Hersom has also been saying that there is something in the Bigfoot nuclear subhuman that is “not of this Earth.”

When Ketchum got on the phone to talk to someone about the results of the DNA study, she mentioned the Starchild skull for some reason. The Starchild Skull is a famous skull that Dr. Lloyd Pye has been working on for a long time that he claims is from an alien.

More below.

Original Ketchum paper mentioned “angel DNA.” A source tells me that Wally Hersom has discussed the initial version of Ketchum’s paper. According to Hersom, the paper is very well written, but its conclusions are hard to take.

Ketchum writes that there are aspects of the Bigfoot nuclear subhuman DNA that she cannot find in any DNA database, and according to her, this means that the DNA is not of this Earth. In the paper, she reportedly refers to this as “angel DNA.” Whether she is trying to say that it is from angels literally or whether this is her way of saying that it’s from outer space, I do not know.

Hersom was reportedly disappointed in the paper and averred that while this may be true, no scientific journal on Earth is going to publish anything about “angel DNA.” I would certainly agree with that statement. Sure, maybe there is “angel DNA” in the Bigfoots. For all I know, this may be true. But on the other hand, of course no journal will touch this with a 10-foot pole.

I do not know whether or not she has rewritten her paper to take out the reference to “angel DNA,” but I would certainly hope so.

Ketchum press release vindicates me as a source for Bigfoot information. My detractors say that I am a poor source of information and that nothing I say is ever true. However, this is not the case.

I was the first person to leak the news about the DNA results of the Ketchum study. Although my leaks were not completely accurate, they were substantially correct. Ketchum’s release lines up well with what I have been saying for a long time now.

Ketchum states that she did full sequencing on 3 separate nuclear DNA samples and that they were submitted blind to four different labs. I reported earlier that one of those full sequences was the Sierra Kills sample. I do not know from which samples the other two nuclear sequences were derived.

She said she has also done complete sequencing on 20 different MtDNA samples, presumably representing 20 separate creatures. This lines up with what I reported earlier, that Ketchum has DNA from 20-28 separate creatures.

She also says that she has 109 different samples, all of which apparently test positive for Bigfoot DNA. Actually, it is not clear from the text whether all 109 tested presumptive for Bigfoot or whether she had 109 samples in total, some from Bigfoots and others from known creatures.

This lines up with what I said earlier, that ~100 of her samples tested presumptive for Bigfoot.

Scott Carpenter verified as a successful sample in Ketchum’s study. I was the first one to report that Carpenter had a successful sample in with her study. That has now apparently been confirmed via a post by David Paulides. In addition, Carpenter has released a blog post with a photo of the possible Bigfoot that he believes left the sample. It’s a very strange photo, and I don’t know what to make of it.

Ketchum verified as doing genetic testing on strange elongated Peruvian skulls associated with the Genesis Project. The Genesis Project is an undertaking that is associated with some very strange elongated skulls dated to several thousand years ago that were found in Peru.

Though assumed to be Homo sapiens sapiens, no one quite knows what they are, to be honest, and they are very strange. It turns out that Ketchum is now doing DNA testing on these skulls. How do I know that? Brien Foerster reveals it on his Facebook page here.

Strange Bigfoot video out of Northeastern Ohio. This video came out just the other day, shot by a birdwatcher in the woods of NE Ohio. We get many sightings from that area.

It’s hard to say for sure what this is, but it may be a Bigfoot.

Possible Bigfoot on thermal in Vermont episode of Finding Bigfoot. This odd recent episode of Finding Bigfoot (which I did not watch) shows Matt Moneymaker and Bob Fay at night with a Flir camera chasing what they think are Bigfoots in the woods of Vermont at nighttime. Although they didn’t recognize it during the show, an astute viewer noted that a possible Bigfoot appears in the video. It can be seen around the 50 second mark in the footage.

What is it? Who knows? It’s a bipedal creature walking around in the woods at night in the freezing cold Vermont forest with no flashlight. It’s either a human or a Bigfoot, we can’t tell which. But how many humans walk around in the woods at night with no flashlight? I’ve been in the woods at night all my life, and I’ve never once seen a human walking around in the woods at night without a light. I would say that they nearly don’t even exist.

Ketchum Project has material from the Lovelock skulls of Nevada. The Lovelock skulls of Nevada are very strange skulls recovered from a cave in Nevada. The local Indians say that those are the skulls of an enemy of their people called “the giants” who lived in the area. The giants had started stealing Indian babies for food, so the Indians chased the giants into the cave, threw bushes in and set them on fire. All of the Indians died in the cave. The Indians describe the giants as huge and red-haired. There is speculation that the giants may have been Bigfoots.

The late, great Richard Stubstad told me that he went to this Nevada museum where the skulls are held. He convinced one of the workers there to let him steal a tiny bone from one of the skeletons. Stubstad took the bone and gave it to Ketchum to test as a possible Bigfoot. Last I heard was that Ketchum never tested it as she thought that the Lovelock skeletons are just Indians.

Arguing against the idea that the skulls are Bigfoots are that a number of Indian artifacts were found in conjunction with the giants, which suggests that they were Indians, not Bigfoots.

Here is a photo of the Lovelock skulls. They are very large.

The Provo Canyon Bigfoot video. A very interesting video was recently shot in Provo Canyon, Utah by a group of young people in their 20′s who were camping in the area. The original video is only 48 seconds long. They are photographing what they think is a bear on the hillside above them when suddenly it stands up on two legs, looking much like a Bigfoot. The shooters then flee in terror, even leaving much of their equipment behind.

Michael Merchant of Team Tazer then conducted a long 45 minute interview with the group. He concludes that the video appears to be real. The subject in the video is either real or it’s a man in a costume. I don’t think it’s a guy in a costume, and I don’t think these young folks hoaxed this video. In other words, I think it’s a Bigfoot.

The original video, now with an incredible 6 million views, is here.

Fulton County, Illinois trailcam Bigfoot. This very odd image below was captured on a trailcam in Fulton County, Illinois. The people who shot the photo say they do not have the slightest idea what it is. The woman who shot the photo is named Jean King and she lives in Fulton County.

She sent the photo into Prairie State Outdoors a while back. The photo had been languishing in the archives of the site unpublicized until a sharp-eyed researcher found it. It’s not a bear. It does look like a Bigfoot. It’s either a Bigfoot or a guy in a suit. So which is it?

Ok, so what the Hell is it? Does it look anything at all like the Melissa Hovey photo?

The extremely curious Rick Dyer camper Bigfoot video. This video has been taking the world by storm since it was released a month or two ago to much controversy. Dyer, of course, is the used car salesman who masterminded the Bigfoot in a freezer hoax out of Georgia a few years back.

After that, he was involved in some other nonsense, including what looks like hoaxed photos and a possible staged event where his camper truck caught on fire as he was leaving to go north to Canada to try to shoot a Bigfoot. One of my sources told me that he set the camper on fire on purpose to get publicity for his Canada stunt.

Dyer has somehow come into some money and has managed to attract a number of investors. He now has a significant team set up and has been running around the north of the country going on various Bigfoot hunting expeditions with his team.

This video showed up on Youtube and sat there for a couple of weeks, only garnering a handful of views. The Bigfoot was shot out of a tent, and the researchers apparently didn’t even know what they had shot a video of as it was uploaded either upside down or sideways. The Bigfoot occurs mispositioned at the end. The video was on a channel for the team’s personal use and apparently was intended to be viewed only by the team.

Somehow Facebook Find Bigfoot saw the video and figured out that the movie was inverted. They righted the video so the figure could be properly seen. A new video in color showed that this was an actual Bigfoot. Then the video went viral and a huge shitstorm ensued.

Although Dyer was not originally associated with the video, some excellent fieldwork by one of Bigfootery’s finest researchers, Steve Kulls, quickly discovered that the video was shot by either Dyer himself or a member of his team.

Then everyone piled on and said this proved that the video was a fake. However, it did not prove this at all. In a conversation with me, Kulls admitted that he never said that the video was fake. He is merely saying that since it is coming from Dyer, an extremely unreliable source with a history of hoaxing, Occam’s Razor would seem to indicate that the extremely hazy nature of the source means that we will never be able to prove whether or not this is a Bigfoot.

Facebook Find Bigfoot was involved with the video from the very start. They felt that the video was shot by a member of Dyer’s team, that the team had no idea what it was for weeks (it was shot upside down, the Bigfoot only appears in the last 2-3 seconds of a 30 second nearly nonsensical video, and after 2 weeks, it had less than 10 views.

According to Facebook FB, this seems to indicate that it is not a hoax. They also thought that the other team members had thrown Dyer out of the group after news broke that he was a member of their group. The team also said that they had more videos, possibly of this same Bigfoot, including one showing the Bigfoot eating something.

They planned to release these videos at a press conference in the near future, but the conference never happened. Of course, the Bigfoot in a freezer catastrophe had also featured a press conference, so this set off even more alarm bells. The community is now sharply divided on this video, with many saying it’s a hoax.

However, I think this is either a real video or it’s the best hoax ever made. I don’t care if Dyer shot it. Just because Dyer has a history of hoaxing doesn’t mean he couldn’t shoot a real video sometime.

Interesting photo showing the Camper Creature next to a photo of Patty.

Camper Bigfoot lined up with Patty. Note the striking resemblance. I’ve yet to see a costume get anywhere this close to Patty’s real look.

Original video enhanced. This is the 2-3 second scene at the end of the original video, enhanced, in color, and played repeatedly.

A great breakdown by Facebook Find Bigfoot that proves this is real.

Bigfoot with love handles breakdown by Facebook Find Bigfoot. Very nice breakdown of an obscure video posted on Youtube and discovered with only a few views. This is definitely a Bigfoot; it has to be. I won’t go into why I think that either. Hoaxers are way too good as it is, and I don’t want to give them any ideas.

Clinton Township, Pennsylvania Bigfoot. Reportedly taken by Jamie T. It was sent into the Bigfoot Evidence blog. The photo is being widely ridiculed as either a guy in a suit or a bush in the forest. However, I rather like it. To me it reminds me of the Harley Hoffman Bigfoot video towards the end of the video. The overall shape of the Bigfoot looks similar.

The mysterious Bigfoot photo from Pennsylvania. Reportedly shot from the front sear of a car. The car had probably pulled off the highway after seeing something. The driver then whipped out his camera and took this shot. The property is posted so the shooter was not able to go on the land to look for tracks.

Canadian Bigfoot video. There is little information available about this very blurry video shot in the wilds of Canada. You cannot make out much of anything about the creature walking in the woods in this video other than the fact that it is bipedal. It’s either a man, a guy in a suit or a Bigfoot. The way it walks reminds me very much of the Penguis Back Road video. And the end of the day, inconclusive, but I do feel that this may be a real Bigfoot.

“Oil Patch Blues,” by Alpha Unit

The Williston Basin lies beneath parts of Montana, North Dakota, and Saskatchewan. A rock unit called the Bakken formation occupies about 200,000 square miles of it. Originally described in 1953, it’s named after Henry Bakken, a farmer in Williston, North Dakota. He owned the land where the first drilling rig revealed the rock layers in 1951. As you may have heard, there are significant oil reserves in the Bakken.

The US Geological Survey has estimated that there are about 3.65 billion barrels of oil in the Bakken. More recent estimates suggest there could be up to 18 billion barrels.

The oil is wrapped in layers of shale, which initially frustrated extraction attempts. But petroleum engineers devised a fracturing method that overcame this problem. What they do is drill down and then horizontally into the rock, then pump water, sand, and chemicals into the hole to crack the shale and allow the oil to flow up. It was first used in 2007, quite successfully.

The result has been a population boom as people from neighboring areas, other parts of the country, and even overseas have rushed into North Dakota and Montana in pursuit of oil field jobs. John McChesney paints a picture of how life has changed for some residents of North Dakota.

Imagine you live in a small rural town worried for years about depopulation, and suddenly, overnight, the population doubles, and the newcomers are thousands of young men without families. Imagine that you live in a tiny town with one main street that doubles as a state highway.

That’s the situation in New Town, N.D., population 1,500 – at least, it was a couple of years ago. Today it’s anybody’s guess how many people live here, and no one knows how many 18-wheelers roll through every day, either. They just know it never stops.

McChesney says that for the people of New Town, it seems that every big tank truck in America is on the road here, making tens of thousands of trips a day hauling water, fracking fluid, wastewater and crude oil – and tearing up the roads.

It’s been described by one county official as the complete industrialization of western North Dakota. And it’s placing an incredible strain on the community there. Dan Kalil, chairman of the Williams County Commission, told McChesney:

They’re consuming all our resources. They’re consuming all our people looking for jobs. All the employee base is used up. Our roads system is being used up. All our water is being used up. All our sewage systems are being used up. They’re overwhelmed. All of our leadership time as local public officials is consumed with this.

And for the newcomers, life in the Bakken isn’t exactly what they had in mind, either. They often arrive with no money and nowhere to live. There’s not enough housing for them. Homeless shelters and churches are taking in some of the job-seekers but the need is overwhelming.

Some of the men are sleeping in their cars. Some have sleeping bags they roll out in the woods or in abandoned buildings. There are camps where people park RV’s they’re living in. But the water pipes and waste tanks on standard RV’s can’t handle the freezing temperatures. Super-insulated campers and trailers are just as hard to find as actual housing.

And let’s not forget: this is North Dakota, after all. One taste of winter in the Bakken sends some job-seekers back to where they came from.

In the meantime, housing prices are higher than they’ve ever been. Some of the local residents can’t afford to pay rent anymore. And crime used to be nearly nonexistent. Now crime rates have spiked across western North Dakota and eastern Montana, with an increase in vagrancy, “drunken and disorderly” charges, burglary, assault, property crimes, and prostitution.

“Men need servicing just as much as their machines,” one oil patch worker told Adam Luebke.

There have even been a couple of violent crimes that have made headlines in the area. A hitchhiker was wounded in a drive-by shooting while on US Highway 2, a major route in and out of the oil patch. A teacher from the oil patch town of Sidney, Montana, was allegedly kidnapped and murdered by two Colorado men on their way to the Bakken.

The oil industry is aware of what locals are going through and is making some PR efforts to keep people on their side, but their efforts aren’t as successful as they’d like. As John McChesney explained:

Back in New Town at a gathering of a few local residents, we met rancher Donnie Nelson, who had just paid $7 for a gallon of milk, one example of a price inflation here. He says patience here is wearing thin.

“Just about anybody I talk to that’s a neighbor – and some of them are getting wealthy – are sick of it. It’s never going to be the same in this country, and they’re starting to realize that we had it kind of good, even though we weren’t No. 1 in oil and we weren’t the No. 1 state economically,” Nelson says. “We had a good life up here.”

“Worker Cooperatives: Creating Participatory Socialism in Capitalism and State Socialism,” by Professor Peter Ranis

Original here. This is a great piece from a great website. If you go to the website, you will see it is an anti-capitalist site. In fact, they are arguing for getting rid of the capitalist system. And replacing it with what? With the cooperate mode of development.

In this economic perspective, we have three development modes:

1. The capitalist mode of development
2. The socialist mode of development
3. The cooperative mode of development

The capitalist mode of development is what we typically know of as the free market or neoliberal mode. It involves the exploitation of labor illustrated by the labor theory of value in which worker’s time is marked up and essentially brokered out in the form the finished product. In pursuit of profits, this model is typically highly abusive to workers, consumers, the environment, politics (which it takes over) and society as a whole.

Wealth continuously flows upwards as the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. It is characterized by market bubbles and subsequent collapses, overproduction and underconsumption, high unemployment, homelessness, deaths due to lack of food, shelter or medical care and a basically chaotic and irrational “boom and bust” business cycle.

As the capitalists capture the state and the media, they use the media to brainwash the workers that their bosses, who are their enemies, are really their friends, and what is good for the ruling class is good for everyone else (trickle down model). Relentless tax cuts impoverish the state and limit its ability to humanize the capitalist rule of the jungle.

Capitalist capture of the state results in privatization and deregulation which are bad for workers, consumers and society. The state, which should be protecting the land, workers and consumers from the depredations of capital, is instead captured by capitalist vultures and adopts an anti-worker, anti-consumer, anti-environmental framework. It’s a Hobbesian Hell, a war of all against all.

The socialist mode of development has usually been proposed as an antidote to the capitalist mode. The socialist mode in which the state runs the economy in the name of the workers and plans the economy via central planning does have many benefits, but it also has a lot of problems.

Lack of market mechanisms means distortions in pricing as goods are not priced according to supply and demand. The result is shortages, poor products and services and long lines. Housing is often mediocre. Even public facilities such as roads, sewage treatment and energy infrastructure is often poorly maintained. Products lack the variety that comes with the market.

As workers cannot be fired, enterprises do not compete with each other for customers. Hence customer service is often poor. Without the threat of dismissal, workers typically do not work very hard. In short, this model has so many problems that hardly anyone is promoting a Soviet model for their economy anymore. Most people, even Marxists, seem to acknowledge some sort of a role for some sort of market.

The cooperative mode of development is definitely a non-capitalist and non-socialist mode of development. As enterprises are owned by the workers instead of the state and production is for profit (for the workers’ benefit) this is not a state socialist model. After all, the state socialist model advocates production for human needs and not for profits. A model based on the profit motive, even if workers themselves reap the gains, would not seem to be state socialist.

Cooperatives compete with each other for customers, so customer service should be good. The risk of monopolies and the attendant collapse of customer service is small due to size limitations. As workers themselves own the enterprises, we end up with a profit-making enterprise that is actually pro-worker instead of anti-worker as the capitalist model tends to be.

As workers live on the land and breathe the air and use the products of society, it’s unlikely that worker cooperatives would despoil the land and abuse customers in order to make a buck. To the extent that the state reflected the interests of cooperatives, the state would no longer be captured by the ultra-rich ruling class and would lack its typical anti-environment, anti-worker and anti-consumer bias that we find under capitalism.

Since cooperatives would be run to make a profit and pricing would be based on supply and demand, most of the problems of the state socialist model would be resolved.

In summary, the cooperate mode of development seems to offer us a lot. It lights a way for us out of the Hell of capitalism without miring us in the mess of state socialism.

Worker Cooperatives: Creating Participatory Socialism in Capitalism and State Socialism

by Professor Peter Ranis

Karl Marx in 1859, in A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, wrote of new modes of production developing within old forms. He wrote,

At a certain stage of development, the material productive forces of society come into conflict with the existing relations of production or with the property relations within the framework of which they have operated hitherto. From forms of development of the productive forces these relations turn into their fetters.

This clearly is the breach into which working class cooperatives can enter today.

In a world where capitalism and state socialism seem the only apparent alternatives, the Occupy movements in the U.S. as well as the recuperated enterprise movements in Argentina have been joined of late in Cuba by a significant public push to form worker cooperatives. This demonstrates forcefully, the demands among workers in all forms of political systems to aspire to worker self-management and democratic participation in their working lives.

The recent Occupy movements in the US to resist home foreclosures, renegotiate student debt and rein in Wall Street financial prerogatives needs to also embrace the occupation of factories and enterprises that threaten to downsize, go off-shore or declare fraudulent bankruptcies as they prepare to move to cheaper labor venues.

In Argentina over 200 worker cooperatives employing over 12,000 workers have formed with the assistance of municipal and provincial expropriations. In the US we have the case of the Chicago Windows and Doors factory as a model that has formed a cooperative and is in search for financing to allow its workers to move forward.

In Cuba, the government of Raúl Castro has had to bring the cooperative worker alternative into the public dialogue by way of the new 2011 Economic and Social Policy Guidelines for the Party and the Revolution. There are already several hundred small worker cooperatives in the US and a number of state-dominated agricultural cooperatives in Cuba.

But now there is a growing understanding among public intellectuals, students and workers themselves that greater worker management and control of the work place will lead to increasing democratization and efficiency that promotes national development under both capitalist and socialist models.

Cooperatives, whether in Argentina, Spain, Italy, Canada, Great Britain or the US have the virtue of fulfilling four features that provide the working class with both justice and equity.

1) They are all encompassing ideologically, absorbing different sectors and individuals of the working class, be they radical, progressive, liberal or conservative in outlook.

2) They share the potentiality of creating working class autonomy and a sense of class consciousness based on learned experiences in the process of production.

3) They create a working class community setting beyond the factory or enterprise that promotes forms of both interest and involvement in politics, by way of their outreach programs into communities in cultural activities, creative arts, health care and continuing education.

4) Once established, cooperatives are available for wider struggles against repressive capitalist and state socialist policies.

In essence cooperatives represent democracy as a form of people’s power rather than simply a capitalist state form of representative democracy or a state socialist form of centralized control structure. Today we have the “indignados” of Spain, the Wisconsin worker uprising, the Arab Spring and the US Occupy movements—all testimony to the potential of workers’ response to injustice and support for rebellion for democratic causes.

A prominent recent example points up the change in the political climate in the US. Many of us recall the case of the Chicago-based Republic Windows and Doors factory that was unceremoniously closed in December of 2008 without the requisite two-month notice as stipulated by the US Warn Act.

After six heroic days of occupation by most of the 260 workers of the plant and significant support from local, state and national politicians, including President Barack Obama, the owners relented via a newly stipulated loan from Bank of America, which had just been bailed out by the federal government to the tune of $25 billion.

Eventually a buyer was found from California called Serious Energy (formerly Serious Materials) which promised to rehire all the workers as they resumed production. Three years later only about a third of the workers had been rehired. By late February of 2012, the new owners again announced an immediate illegal shutdown.

Again the workers occupied the plant asking for time to come up with a plan to find a new buyer or establish a worker-managed cooperative plant. This time because of the groundswell of community support arriving at the plant led by Occupy Chicago and Jobs with Justice, instead of taking six days, it took but eleven hours for the workers of Republic Windows to be given a three-month reprieve.

The workers are now in the process of establishing New Era Windows Cooperative as the first large industrial cooperative in the US. One of the leaders of the workers, Armando Robles, spoke of plant occupations and worker cooperatives created in Argentina as their model. He also hoped that their struggle through occupation would become something repeated across the US and the world when workers face similar arbitrary closings.

It should not be lost on workers in the US that the watchword for Argentine workers recuperating their factories was “Occupy, Resist, and Produce!”

What is missing in this scenario is the act of public expropriation that has been used by municipal and provincial governments in Argentina. In the US we have the same legal mechanism to achieve worker-owned and worker-managed factories and enterprises. It is eminent domain.

Eminent domain has been used for decades for the building of highways, airports, hospitals, municipal offices, schools, libraries, public parks, sport stadiums and arenas for reasons of urban development and public benefit. It is appropriate during this critical global recession to defend against the loss of jobs, to apply this same mechanism on behalf of the working class.

It can be defended as preserving a public resource that redounds to community needs and survival. The time is ripe for American labor to pursue the strategy of eminent domain as public policy to protect the livelihood and promote the general welfare of millions of “at risk” workers. Plant and enterprise closings have severe negative repercussions and societal externalities on workers and communities.

The collective social rights of workers who have built up the value of the firm through years of hard work and applying their know-how and skill have to be legally asserted. The companies cannot be free of societal obligations. By closing or outsourcing jobs they have broken a contract for which there must be reparations and consequences.

In a very real sense the workers are keeping their place of work that they have fostered and developed over many years rather than taking it away from an irresponsible and profit-maximizing and aggrandizing private employer.

In Cuba we find a similar groundswell developing on the edges of a society still basically dominated by party, state and government bureaucracies. The recent Communist Party Guidelines of 2011 point to a recognition that the political system must adapt to the needs of working class productivity and empowerment.

The expropriation process will be unnecessary in Cuba, but the implementation of cooperatives will follow similar processes and procedures as workers begin to organize themselves into collective and democratically-run enterprises separate and autonomous from state dominance and controls.

The cooperative initiatives in Cuba scheduled for late 2012 and early 2013 are being approached parallel to the more troubling unleashing of small entrepreneurial businesses with limitations on the number of employees. However, the state presumptions and rationale are similar: workers must be afforded greater autonomy and decision-making in order to be more productive and less alienated.

The Cuban state seems to have decided that cooperatives are 1) both rational in that they will keep the laborers and employees in productive jobs and avoid unemployment, extreme social poverty and malaise that is dangerous to the Cuban state and 2) it is doing the right thing by way of enhanced income distribution for the majoritarian class in Cuban society.

Markets in the US and Argentina would continue under cooperative development and Cuba will decentralize its economy by various cooperative and entrepreneurial reforms. With the rise of cooperative federations, already in formation in Argentina, we can envision economies based over time on more and more worker ownership, control and management.

The state’s role continues but it becomes less a state penetrated by corporations (like the US and Argentina) nor a producer state (like Cuba’s).

Argentina, the US and Cuba continue their functions as regulatory states focusing on fiscal and monetary policy, trade, ecology and the environment, consumer protection, health and human rights, economic investment banking, infrastructure development, education, foreign and defense policy but surrendering over time the reins over the domestic economy and eventually the commanding heights of the industrial and service economy.

To return to Marx once more. In his Inaugural Address to the Working Men’s International Association in London in 1864, he made an early assessment of worker cooperatives.

He said,

The value of these great social experiments cannot be over-rated. By deed, instead of by argument, they have shown that production on a large scale, and in accord with the behests of modern science, may be carried on without the existence of a class of masters employing a class of hands; that to bear fruit, the means of labor need not be monopolized as a means of dominion over, and of extortion against the laboring man himself; and that, like slave labor, like serf labor, hired labor is but a transitory and inferior form destined to disappear before associated labor plying its toil with a willing hand, a ready mind and a joyous heart.

911 Operator Hangs Up on Caller

Who is right, and who is wrong in this case? Is she right and he wrong? Is she wrong and he right? Are they both wrong? If so, is one more wrong than the other?

Watch the video and discuss. There will be a short quiz at the end.

Bigfoot News September 14, 2012

Olympic Project successful submissions to Dr. Melba Ketchum DNA project revealed. A source has informed me that the Olympic Project submitted ~103 hair samples to Ketchum’s project, and ~85 of them tested presumptive to Bigfoot by DNA. Another ~18 Olympic Project hair samples were apparently from either humans or known animals. Those 85 successful submissions represent anywhere from 5-13 separate creatures.

Apparently all of the hair was gathered in the Olympic Peninsula of Washington state. This makes the Olympic Project the largest submitter to the project.

Updated list of successful samples to Ketchum Project. Here it is:

Rundown of samples in the Ketchum study. This will be updated every time it changes.

Bigfoot samples submitted: Over 200
Presumptive for Bigfoot: Almost 100
# of Bigfoot individuals represented: 20-28

Details of successful Bigfoot samples:

5 hair samples from Golden Ears Provincial Park in British Columbia representing 3 separate creatures – a male, a female and a juvenile from a family unit who were observed together prior to collecting the samples – gathered in 2010 by Randy Brisson of the Erickson Project.

1 toenail from Larry Jenkins in the Grand Canyon area of Arizona.

1 blood sample from JC Johnson in the Four Corners area of New Mexico (skunk in a drainpipe sample).

1 blood and tissue sample of a female Bigfoot representing either “Matilda” or her mother from Crittenden, Kentucky, gathered by the Dennis Pfohl and Leila Hadj-Chikh of the Erickson Project. Sample was obtained by gluing glass shards on a feeding plate.

1 hair sample from David Paulides’ NABS known as the Ulibarri sample from Hoopa Valley, California.

1 hair sample from Larry Surface in Southern Ohio. Surface shot the controversial nighttime Bigfoot video that was pulled from the web a while back.

1 hair sample (possible Dogman) from Joe Black in the Great Smoky Mountains, Eastern Tennessee.

1 tissue (flesh including muscle and fat) sample in the form of a slice of Bigfoot flesh from Mount Haskell, California from the adult male Bigfoot shot dead on October 10, 2010 by Justin Smeja in the Sierra Kills incident.

1 large sample of saliva from the Olympic Peninsula, Washington, collected by the Olympic Project obtained via a Bigfoot licking a trail camera.

1 hair sample from SE Oklahoma collected by TEXLA Cryptozoological Research.

1 blood, tissue and hair sample from a nailboard trap at Snelgrove Lake, Ontario, Canada (presumably successful).

~85 hair samples from the Olympic Peninsula, Washington, collected by the Olympic Project representing 5-13 separate individuals.

That is apparently all or nearly all of the nearly 100 successful Bigfoot samples. The other 100 samples are all apparently from either humans or known animals.

Best Bigfoot samples: Smeja’s Bigfoot steak and JC Johnson’s skunk in a drainpipe Bigfoot blood sample.

Who bailed out Adrian Erickson? Last fall, Erickson was in deep doodoo financially. He was working 6 days a week, 12 hours a day trying to keep his real estate business above water. He was being sued by several parties, including the buyers of his homes. He was under a lot of physical and psychological toll – basically a stress case. His numerous investors were getting upset.

Erickson built a large real estate development in British Columbia called Ruby Ridge. He sold a number of lots but then became underwater with the US recession caused by radical neoliberal capitalism’s unregulated banking sector and massive bankster fraud. This neoliberalism-generated recession affected the whole world, including Canada. Erickson was having a hard time selling homes due to the downturn in the housing market.

He had promised buyers are variety of amenities for their lots including phone and cell coverage, water, sewage lines and roads. With no more money coming in, he was unable to provide these amenities. Through no fault of Erickson’s, his lot buyers were left holding the bag.

He also spent $3 million on his Bigfoot project, the Erickson Project, with no results to show for it yet.

Things looked grim. The prospect of bankruptcy for the business and foreclosure on Erickson’s very nice home loomed.

I’m not divulging too much personal information here as most of this has already been reported in the British Columbia press.

Here it is, 9 months later, and everything has changed. Early in the year, Erickson apparently took his Bigfoot documentary to Hollywood where it was worked on with post-production editing. In the interim, Erickson’s financial problems seem to have evaporated or at least gotten much better. The word we have is that financially, things are going quite well.

This does not make sense. The housing market in BC has not returned since last fall, so he’s not selling anymore homes than he was then. How did he get the money to send the doc to Hollywood to have it worked on? It makes no sense, because at the time it was down there, Erickson was flat broke. How did he get the huge amount of money needed to bail him out of the financial hole? He could not have made it selling lots. Someone must have bailed him out in some way.

Erickson is now happy and calm and is no longer working all the time. He is back guiding hunts and again, and he’s going to Africa soon to hunt. He seems relaxed about the subject of Bigfoot and acts like it is out of his hands and his life.

Whereas previously for a long time, he got angry anytime anyone brought up the subject. On numerous occasions, Erickson said he didn’t want to hear the word Bigfoot ever again. Furthermore, Erickson and Ketchum, who never got along, have now mysteriously become BFF’s.

Logically, none of this makes any sense. The only way this could have happened is that an unknown person or persons with a lot of money stepped in and got Erickson out of his hole by sending a lot of money his way, either via gift or investment.

I suspected that Wally Hersom gave Erickson the cash to get him out of the hole he was in and to send the documentary down to Hollywood.

However, when I asked around, a source close to Hersom emphatically told me that he strongly doubted that Hersom had either bailed Erickson out or even given him the money to take his doc to Hollywood to have it worked on.

There is suspicion that Ketchum is now the owner of Erickson’s footage, but it has been impossible to confirm. However, it does remain a hunch of mine for reasons I cannot divulge.

The events surrounding Erickson and his movie in the last 9 months remain shrouded in mystery.

Photos and video of Bigfoots exist that are better than the Patterson footage. Photos and video have been shot in the past 20 years that are said to be better than the Patterson footage. They are better than the Patterson footage in that it is clearer. At least a couple of them were shot in the Pacific Northwest.

A source who has seen the footage says that there is no way it could have been hoaxed. In both cases, the persons who own the footage refuse to release it because of the Hellish notoriety of publicity that cascades down on anyone who releases purported Bigfoot footage. The crucifixion of Melissa Hovey over her photo is a good recent example.