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It is intriguing at the very least. Now here is an article that I found herehttp://www.oregonbigfoot.com/melba-ketchum-Bigfoot-DNA-study_2011.php and I'm sure many have already come across it but there is a point to make so I'll go ahead and post it. The bolded, italicized, and underlined text is mine.: "April, 2001: A British expedition team is led to a hollow cedar tree in the Kingdom of Bhutan, in the eastern Himalayas by Sonam Dhendup, the King of Bhutan's official yeti hunter. A long black hair was found and DNA analysis was conducted by Bryan Sykes, professor of human genetics at the Institute of Molecular Medicine in Oxford. “We found some DNA in it, but we don’t know what it is... It’s not a human, not a bear or anything else we have so far been able to identify. It’s a mystery and I never thought this would end in a mystery. We have never encountered DNA that we couldn’t recognize before.” Sykes was the first scientist to extract DNA from archaeological bone specimens. Analysis completed after the media release, however, clearly showed that the samples were from the Brown Bear and the Asiatic Black Bear. 2009: Josh Gates and the Destination Truth team return to Bhutan to look for the Yeti after having found tracks on the season premiere of season two. The team recovers a hair sample and it is brought to Dr. Melba Ketchum of DNA Diagnostics. Dr. Ketchum states, "This sample did test very clearly on the human panel of markers. That makes it a primate, and it makes it a large primate." When Gates asks her if contamination could be an issue, she replies, "The hair, visually, is not human. It's courser than horse tail hair... Initial searches indicate that it's an unknown sequence. There are literally millions of sequences in this database. And we're really shocked that it didn't match any of the species exactly in the database... If we're going to prove that there potentially is a new species, with this first hair sample, we really need more hair samples like it. And once you establish there is a group of animals, that will go a long ways towards proving that there is a new species indeed." So, what is the point I'm making here. The first time around sample went to Dr. Sykes. The Second time the sample went to Dr. Ketchum....Why the change? Why not stay with Dr. Sykes. Lack of funding? Lack of trust? Failure to find Sasquatch/Yeti DNA the first time around? Was it because the Ketchum's Sasquatch Genome Project was by then (2009) in full swing and fully funded? Now I know these kinds of questions may not seem important to some but they are to me. I'm pretty sure I won't be able to find the answers to everything that I wonder about and maybe the answers are somewhere out there. I do know that Josh Gates, paranormal researcher, and Destination Truth was in it's second season on the SyFY Network when he sought out Dr. Ketchum. Rob Lowe in fact seems to be following in not only Leonard Nimoy's footsteps but it would seen Josh Gates' as well. And then of course there's Matt Moneymaker's Finding Bigfoot. It begs the question of just how well do all of these people know each other? Who's in the loop and who isn't. Melba Ketchum didn't believe in Sasquatch before her project began. She had done a couple of tests for some samples sent to her pretty early on but was probably an eye-roller in the beginning. BUT she does seem to have a paranormal side to her to this day so I can see how she might have gotten swept up into the Bigfoot arena. Before that though she didn't even know who was who so IMHO she was the perfect person to set up with a hoax being naïve and all. I cab see where she could've been easily duped by "Matilda" and Smeja and perhaps others and that's why I think it's vital to show the methodology she used to stay out of the quagmire. She was a lot smarter in that respect than some have given her credit for. Whether or not the samples were any good or the results questionable, which they are, the plan she had in place for herself and her team was very correct. They did the right things the right way as far as getting the samples tested and in implementing that whole idea of double blind testing. More on that later. I think Erickson is behind me at this point and it's probably a good time to move onto Smeja and that whole ball of confusion. Also there will be attention paid to Dr. Ketchum herself and the respect for her expertise in her field.

I was really looking forward to hear more theories on range and population. Maybe there should be a habituation thread? If not, my 2 cents....hard to believe habituators and that there are these hidden photos out there that prove existence. As many crazy people as there are out there....someone would break someone's trust to steal the picture and go public themselves.

I've written about an elderly couple I know in Stone County, Missouri who have had activity on their property for two decades. This wasn't an habituation situation. It was a matter of the clan making regular stopovers on their property and an adjacent lot. They've had relatively few actual sightings, but plenty of activity around the house, including the movement of heavy objects in the night to gain access to food. In recent years the couple's health has declined, and the wife was actually menaced by more than one bigfoot as she prepared to leave one predawn morning to visit her husband in the hospital. They moved in on her between her first trip out to the jeep to load items and her second trip out to leave. Of note, the elderly widow from whom they purchased the property was considered batty because more than once she drove recklessly down the ridge into town in the middle of the night in a panic over things from the woods trying to get into her house. One of the consistent behaviors when the bigfoot were around was what the wife considered to be constant surveillance during the day. Their house is at the top of a ridge overlooking Table Rock Lake with a woodpile near the edge of the slope going down to the lake. I've walked the slope to get a sense of it. To me, it seems younger members of the clan climbed trees downslope to view their activity around the house, and larger members approached within twenty feet of the house using the heavy vegetation just downslope of the woodpile to provide concealment. The jeep is usually parked between the front door and the woodpile. The wife tells me that their cats, during times when there was other activity, would get up on the furniture and stare, in an alert stance, for hours at specific trees on the slope. During these periods the cats refused to go outside unless accompanied by one of the couple, and stayed close to the house. On one occasion about five years ago the husband went to the woodpile to restack it, and a large black animal that he at first thought was a massive dog, broke cover and ran from behind the woodpile, not downhill, but along the level crest of the slope to the adjacent property in full view. It ran rapidly and powerfully on four legs until it approached the low fence at the property line, then transitioned into running on its back legs for about sixty feet as it approached and vaulted the low fence. Then it cut to the left into the tree line, changing it's direction, like a "halfback avoiding a tackler" without using its forelimbs to execute the cut. Up until that point, though he acknowledged that there was "something" in the woods, he had refused to consider that it might be one or more bigfoot. Though he's now privately convinced, he still will not mention the words bigfoot or mo-mo. About two years ago the adjacent property was purchased and the new owners built a house on the lot, clearing the level wooded area into which the large animal had run, and building a house there. Since that time activity levels have dramatically declined. The wife says that there no longer appear to be periods of prolonged surveillance, and believes that prior to the new construction the itinerant group had been staying in the level wooded area on the adjacent property when visiting, just 100 yards from their house. Occasionally something does happen to indicate that they still come through, though there isn't enough sustained activity to indicate that the group stays nearby anymore. Earlier this summer, the husband bought a live trap to catch a squirrel that was raiding the bird feeders on their upper deck and successfully caught the squirrel not long before sunset. Because it was late, he decided to leave the squirrel in the trap overnight. During the night while his wife was upstairs, something heavy walked onto the deck and she could hear it rattling, and then banging, the trap (somewhere between five and ten pounds) against the deck furniture, then leave. She chose not to look out the window (she'd seen them a few times before). The next morning, the trap was gone "as if carried off like a lunchbox". I've offered to put the couple in touch with investigators. They've consistently declined. The wife reads this forum, though she is not a member, and I've provided her with Branco's book about encounters in Alabama. They simply don't want to upset the balance of things, and the fact that there's a certain mystery associated with their retirement property is something they accept and apparently value.

H, Succinct and spot on, lad. IMO, Nature's reaction to the original presentation of Ketchum's work clearly defined their (and probably most of other such entities) kowtow to the altar of PC'ness. Subsequently, did the offensive to deride and discredit her work become necessary as her isolation and vilification was requisite in order to CYA? As Americans, we have a historical record of challenging authority and status quo as after all, the US Constitution and Bill of Rights pretty much lay all that out rather plainly. The disconnect is many take scientific publications as purely scientific in nature and decline to acknowledge/question the political undertones and other gambits that may be lying just underneath the surface. Am am in no way concluding Ketchum is infallible however, the ferocity of her detractors does give reason to consider, did they really have something to fear from the findings she brought to light?

Which I think solidifies the mindset that both the convoluted DNA results and Matilda was a premeditated hoax from the get go. Interestingly enough her first act after releasing the hoax was parallel to Standing. She tried to introduce legislation to protect the species. If either of them ever truly proved the species to be real? I would support it 200%!