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To me, the truth is that the whole Ketchum affair was a classic case of garbage in, garbage out, bad science. It wasn't an intentionally dishonest scam, just a methodologically incompetent, fantasy-driven embarrassment. For a while now, I've been noticing that the overall Bigfoot community seems to suffer from fad-like phases of differing points of attention or emphasis. For instance, the Glickman report represents the height (or last throes?) of data-driven, analysis-based investigation of the Bigfoot phenomenon. Shortly after its publication, and coincident with the rise of the BFRO, there was a shift to "fieldwork." The result was a sort of "citizen science" trend that, while well-intended, often manifested as troops of clueless amateurs trampling through the woods on glorified camping trips, spooking every bit of wildlife within miles. After that, there was a tendency to "NativeAmericanize" everything about the phenomenon. The height of this phase was Davis' twin "Digger Indian" and "massacre" interpretations of the Patterson-Gimlin film. While it is certainly valuable to acknowledge and benefit from the fact that Native Americans have been encountering Bigfoot for far longer than European-Americans have, the "NativeAmericanization" fad largely ignored the nature of folklore and its mythical aspects in favor of taking every legend at face value. In recent years, the focus has once again shifted in such a way that many "experiencers" have been permitted to set themselves up as self-proclaimed unassailable authority figures on the realities of the Bigfoot phenomenon, with much in common with the "contactee" movement in Ufology decades earlier. I hope I am right in perceiving this fad as trailing off lately. In my opinion, little of scientific value has been accomplished in the Bigfoot field since the early 2000s when this meandering among the pursuit of less scientific emphases really took over the community. Which brings me back to Ketchum. Ketchum emerged more or less at the transition point from the tail end of the "NativeAmericanization" fad to the initiation of the current "experiencer"/habituation fad. Her history in the field strongly suggests that she had already reached her "conclusion," inspired by Native American "maiden snatching" tales, before she ever obtained her first DNA sample. Then, working in conjunction with some of the most pathetically disreputable habituation claimants and other people of questionable integrity, she collected a set of samples of such poor quality and such dubious provenance that they could prove absolutely nothing or absolutely anything, depending on the agenda of the one doing the analysis. With these in hand, she unsurprisingly drew her "conclusion," really just a reiteration of her premise, that Bigfoot was a hybrid between Homo sapiens and another hominid species, resulting from interbreeding that was strongly implied to have been forced. Garbage in, garbage out. It was junk, it should have been expected to be junk from the beginning, and it's time for the Bigfoot community to move on. More fruitful avenues await us.

By Jeff Meldrum https://beta.capeia.com/zoology/2017/10/20/on-the-plausibility-of-another-bipedal-primate-species-existing-in-north-america As I knelt beside the 38 cm footprint, one of several dozen distinctly impressed in the muddy side road in the foothills of the Blue Mountains of southeastern Washington, the hair literally stood up on my neck with the incredulous sensation that a sasquatch may indeed have passed by here just hours earlier. The clarity of detail and dynamic signatures left no ambiguity, no room for misidentification. These footprints were either a very clever hoax or the track of an unknown living creature. The spontaneity, variation and animation of the footprints tipped the scales decidedly in favor of the latter option. But what were the implications of that conclusion? As a budding physical anthropologist, I had essentially shelved my youthful curiosity about Bigfoot and assumed that the passage of decades without any physical evidence justified a skeptical indictment of the subject as nothing more than folklore and legend. Here, on an overcast afternoon in February 1996, was stark evidence to the contrary. Of course it was not definitive, as in the form of a specimen, a type to establish conclusively the existence of a novel hominoid species. And short of that, I was to learn, there was no accommodating by the anthropological discipline of even the proposition of such a species, regardless of the accumulating affirmative evidence. It is one matter to address the theoretical possibility of a relict species of hominoid in North America, and the obligate shift in paradigm to accommodate it, but there must also be something substantial to place within that revised framework. There must be essential evidence to lend weight to the hypotheses, and counter the critics’ various aspersions. I was once confronted by a colleague, who declared, “After all, these are just stories.” My response: “Stories that apparently leave tracks, shed hair, void scat, vocalize, are observed and described by reliable experienced witnesses. Hardly just stories.” Others mock the notion as “pseudoscience,” but fail to explain their justification for that label, let alone provide a defensible rationale for their pat disqualification of the evidence at hand. Then there is the now popularized statement by ideological skeptic Michael Shermer, which eventually became the basis of a column in Scientific American, 2003 – “The science starts once you have a body.” On the contrary, most serious investigators would contend that the science starts once you have a question, followed by observation, and the accumulation of data. Each of these detractions begs the question of evidentiary substance that motivates investigation, and instead either off-handedly dismisses all evidence, or demands conclusive proof up front, a priori. That is hardly the method or process of explorative science. Many remain skeptical of the premise simply due to what they assume to be an exceptionally low probability that such creatures could remain undetected and unacknowledged today by modern science, especially within the continental United States. It has been pointed out that there is no history of known hominoids　 in North America. Indeed the original primates to have ever inhabited North America were squirrel-sized to cat-sized Eocene prosimian primates, most closely related to modern lemurs and lorises, not apes or hominins　. South and Central America would subsequently be colonized by platyrrhine primates, a diverse radiation now represented by marmosets to spider monkeys. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Further discussion in the article: What would be the source of a giant relict hominoid in North America? Why is there no fossil record of sasquatch in North America? Where are any recent physical remains? How would a relict hominoid make a living in a temperate forest habitat? Footprint evidence And more, in the article by Dr. Meldrum. Enjoy!

"Belief" isn't part of my equation. When someone asks if I "believe in" bigfoot, the answer is "not exactly: I've seen them. It is not mere belief, it is knowledge." MIB