Rick Dyer’s Tent Bigfoot Video was witnessed by a British documentary film crew. Morgan Matthews, a director with Minnow Films in the UK, has been following several US Bigfoot researchers around for several years now for a documentary called Of Monsters and Men.
Dyer himself shot the 1.2 second Tent Video with his cellphone. The film crew witnessed the shooting of the video in the next tent over. The two BBC camera were rolling away both before and after Dyer’s cellphone clip.
Rick Dyer is one of the researchers that they have been following around. In early September, they were on a 10-day expedition with Dyer’s crew near San Antonio, Texas. During this time, on September 6, 2012, the film crew filmed 3 minutes of a male Bigfoot eating meat from a bait station in a tree. The Bigfoot is then filmed reacting to the film crew emerging from their tent. Two shoulder-mounted cameras were running the whole time. These are excellent state of the art film production cameras, which is why the film quality is so good.
The quality is quite a bit better than the camcorder that Sissy, the female owner of the Crittenden, Kentucky property was using when she filmed Matilda at the habituation site in 2005. This footage became part of the Adrian Erickson Project’s documentary which is probably now owned by Dr. Melba Ketchum.
The documentary is slated to be shown at the Tribeca Film Festival in April 2013, but some members of the Bigfoot community are urging Minnow to issue a pre-release of this footage or at least a teaser of it.
There is a possibility that Dyer’s team hoaxed the film production crew with a man in a costume, but that seems highly dubious to me. I always thought that this footage was genuine.
Initial leak from Dr. Brian Sykes parallel Bigfoot study looks good for believers and bad for scofftics. I have a tantalizing leak from the Sykes study out of Britain. Reports state that his initial findings agree with the results of Ketchum’s Bigfoot DNA study, but differ in terms of interpretation of those results. Unfortunately, I do not have the foggiest idea of what that means! It looks like he may be agreeing that there is an existing relict hominid called Bigfoot roaming about, but he may differ with Ketchum on what the exact nature of this relict hominid is. The source of the information is someone who is very close to the Ketchum study.
Sykes is still taking samples for his study. It is said that he stopped taking samples for his study a while back, but that’s not true. There are samples that are on their way to him right now. And indeed, a piece of the Bigfoot steak from the Sierra Kills will be part of the Sykes study.
Ketchum DNA study may still be in peer review at a US journal. There is much controversy over the recent revelation by Dr. Igor Burtsev of Russia who stated that Ketchum’s study had failed peer review at US journals, and hence he was going to publish it at a journal in Russia. That may or may not be true. This was followed by a flurry of pessimistic and Ketchum-bashing posts on how she had failed, etc.
My information from sources close to the Ketchum camp is that the paper is indeed still in review at a major US journal. In fact, I have received some comments from one of the peer reviewers themselves! The peer reviewers are simply holding to a very strict standard of science; they do not believe some of the allegations in the paper, and sensibly so. That’s all the hangup is all about. Just good, hard science.
One of the hangups was that the journal refuses to believe that real DNA evidence of an existing creature could exist without any good photos or videos of this creature. To them, that makes no sense whatsoever, so the paper has been held up for about the last six months while Melba’s team runs hither and thither trying to come up with any and all decent video and photo footage that they can find. There is another hangup that I will detail below.
Burtsev revelation was due to a leak on Ketchum’s team. A member of Ketchum’s study leaked some of the results to Burtsev in Russia, and then Burtsev went forward with his leak. The Ketchum team thought it was not Burtsev’s fault and instead it was the fault of the team member who leaked to Burtsev. The team member was subsequently dismissed. Ketchum then felt that she needed to clarify Burtsev’s leak with a public statement. It’s true that she is violating journal rules by doing this, and I don’t have any explanation for her behavior. Maybe the journal has given her the go-ahead to make some pre-releases about her paper.
I also feel that Ketchum is trying to force the journal’s hand by forcing them to finish up the peer review, pass the paper and publish it soon. If the journal doesn’t publish it in a month or so, the Ketchum team is threatening to go to Russia with the paper and publish it there, where it is sure to pass review.
Comments from a female peer reviewer on Ketchum’s paper. One of my commenters is friends with a man who knows a woman who is on the peer review team that is looking at Ketchum’s paper. According to the man, the woman was holding up the paper because she refused to believe that if Bigfoots were created in Ice Age SW Europe 15,000, then they could have somehow ended up in North America possibly soon afterwards.
The birth of Bigfoot would have to be somewhere in Asia, possibly Siberia or the Far East, for the Bigfoots to follow the Amerindians into the Americas. This is all based on the assumption that Bigfoots followed the Amerindians across the Bering Strait into the Americas. The Bigfoots would have had to have been in Siberia to do that. So how do the Bigfoots get from SW Europe to Siberia? To the reviewer, this made no sense, and Ketchum had no explanation for it either.
However, a recent study confirming what I had always suspected – that Europeans from 15-20,000 YBP are genetically close to Amerindians – apparently strengthens Ketchum’s case. Apparently the ancient Europeans and paleo Amerindians share a common ancestor in ancient Europe and ancient Siberia.
As you can see, there is apparently nothing wrong with the paper’s science itself; instead, it is questions like this that is holding up the paper.
The female reviewer also stated that people do tend to see patterns where none exist, and it was the concern of this reviewer that this is what Ketchum was doing with her paper.
The reviewer also stated dramatically in reference to Ketchum’s paper and proving the existence of Bigfoot, “This won’t be the end of the debate. It will only be the beginning.”
Ketchum’s sequencing of three whole Bigfoot nuclear DNA genomes prompted a major rewrite of her paper. That’s correct. Sequencing those genomes changed the whole ballgame and necessitated a humongous rewrite of the whole paper.
Sally Ramey, Ketchum’s former spokesperson, reportedly paid a visit to a dying Bigfoot friend to say goodbye to him. If you have read the incredible book, 50 Years with Bigfoot, by Janice Carter Coy and Mary Green, you know the unbelievable story that is told in that book. I won’t reiterate it, but the author discusses how she has been habituating with Bigfoots for most of her life. A male Bigfoot named “Fox” plays a large role in the story.
Janice’s grandfather rescued Fox when he was a baby. A tree fell on him and pinned him under it. The grandfather rescued the baby Bigfoot and nursed it back to health in his shed. The grandfather and the Bigfoot formed a lifetime bond. The grandfather is said to have taught the Fox some words of English and in return, Fox taught the grandfather some words of the Bigfoot language, whatever the heck that is. The family then fed Fox and the various members of his Bigfoot family for many years. At one point, when Janice was a 15 year old girl, Fox charged her when she was riding her horse. He knocked her off her horse, and she broke her leg.
There is much more to the Fox story, but I will let you read the book to figure that out.
At some point a while back, Fox was getting very old and nearing the end of his life. Apparently he sent for Janice and some of her friends to come visit him at the place where he was dying in the forest. Janice Coy, Sally Ramey and possibly other persons went out to the place in the woods where Fox was dying. They visited him there and paid their last respects to him. Fox apparently died about one week later.
Well, that’s a pretty incredible story, no? And this is Ketchum’s main spokesperson we are talking about now.
Erickson Project homepage updated. Since the release of Ketchum’s press release, the EP page has been updated. Erickson appears to be trying to get some recognition for being one of the first people to discover Bigfoot. This is also Ketchum’s goal, and David Paulides seems to be working the same angle. I think Adrian will deserve a lot of credit when the species is recognized, which should be soon.
Erickson notes that his early MtDNA studies of suspected Bigfoot samples kept coming back “East European.” The labs kept insisting that the samples were all human or contaminated by humans, but Adrian and Dennis Pfohl did not believe those findings. They also thought it was very suspicious that the samples were all coming back “East European.” Didn’t make a lot of sense.
It was then that Adrian contacted Melba Ketchum to do further DNA testing on his samples. Why was Ketchum chosen? Because she was the only one who would work with Erickson’s samples! Erickson asked quite a few other scientists to work on it, but they all refused because they thought Bigfoot was ridiculous. So they went with Ketchum. She was not their first choice!
Ketchum says she has HD video of Bigfoots that she will release with her paper. I have been saying for some time now that I think that Erickson sold out his documentary footage to Melba Ketchum. Ketchum is probably referring to Erickson’s footage when she talks about HD video. I believe that Wally Hersom gave her the money to buy out Erickson about one year ago. The footage then went to Hollywood for post-production work. Hence, Erickson’s video and Ketchum’s paper are no longer connected by NDA as they were before.
Erickson Project’s Matilda footage was shot from 40 feet away. The much publicized “Matilda” footage of an adolescent female Bigfoot shot on video by a woman named Sissy at Crittenden, Kentucky in 2005 was shot from only 40 feet away. Depending on who you talk to, it’s either the greatest thing since sliced bread, or it’s not even very impressive. 40 feet is about 10-15 yards away. The footage includes footage of the Bigfoot’s face from that distance. At some point in the video, the Bigfoot is alerted to the videographer’s presence and Matilda takes off running down the hill. Sissy and her husband were bow hunters, and Sissy was decked out in full camo gear when she shot the footage.
Bigfoot is apparently Homo heidelbergensis. David Claerr, one of the finest Bigfoot researchers in the field today, has informed me that he thinks that the Bigfoots are Homo heidelbergensis. Claerr has somehow managed to look at bones, skeletons and skulls of purported Bigfoots in both museums and private collections (How in the heck did he ever get a chance to view those things!?). He then compared what he saw with the existing fossil record. What he saw lines up best with Homo heidelbergensis, a rather primitive and ape-like ancestor of us, Homo sapiens sapiens.
Heidelbergensis appears to be a link between late Homo erectus and early Homo sapiens. Early Sapiens types would include Denisovans and Neandertals. Neandertal goes back about 500,000 YBP and Denisovans may go back as far as 700,000 YBP or more. Ketchum has stated that Bigfoot DNA on the NuDNA side goes back quite a bit further than either Denisovans or Neandertals. This would line up well with the notion that Bigfoot NuDNA is from either Erectus or some sort of a derived Erectus such as Heidelbergensis. Jeff Meldrum says that a skull of a purported Heidelbergensis specimen in China was dated to only 12,000 YBP.
Argument that there were no other Homos living with Homo sapiens sapiens (us or H.s.s.) 30,000 YBP, and therefore the premise of Ketchum’s study is nonsense. This is one of the arguments that the scofftics are using to dismiss the findings of the study.
However, Neandertal is known to have survived up until 10-15,000 YBP in Russia’s very far north. In addition, Homo floresiensis (which is indeed a valid species) survived until 12,000 YBP and possibly until the late 1800′s if local stories about Ebu Gogo are to be believed. In addition, Meldrum states that a Homo heidelbergensis skull is known from China 12,000 YBP. In addition, Solo Man (very late Erectus?) is known from Indonesia 27,000 YBP. A bit further out, Denisovans are known from Siberia 39,000 YBP. In addition, the recent Red Deer Cave People from China, thought to be a new species of Homo, are known from 11-14,000 YBP.
Red Deer Cave People may be Bigfoots. Looking at the drawings of the recent Red Deer Cave People discovered in China with a date of 11-14,000 YBP, I was struck at how much the skulls looked like the facial profile in Larry Surface’s Ohio Bigfoot video (proven by DNA via Ketchum). One of my commenters now feels that Red Deer Cave Man is Homo heidelbergensis. What she bases that on, I do not know. There is now a lot of argument about whether or not the Red Deer Cave People are a new species or an odd type of H.s.s. Assuming that the Red Deer Cave People are Heidelbergensis, they may indeed be good candidates for the Bigfoots.
Heidelbergensis DNA may be present in modern day Africans. There were headlines recently when geneticists reported that all modern members of the African race harbor a significant amount of ancient, non H.s.s. DNA in their genome. It’s not known what DNA this is, but it is said to be more ancient than either Denisovan or Neandertal. This means that African H.s.s. bred in with some relict hominid types in Africa at some point. I have noticed that recent references in paleontology on the web are referring to this African relict hominid DNA as “Heidelbergensis.” How or why they think that is what it is, I have no idea.