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I went for a walk Saturday. 10+ miles, 3 on trail, 7 out through the woods over logs under logs through brush etc. Got lost-ish for a while. Trail vanished under drifts up to 6 feet deep. Bit sunburned. Bug-chewed. Some minor issues with leg cramps. NO BLISTERS!! My best picture from the trip: Little bit of zoom on that. It's about 5-6 mils to the snowy ridgeline. MIB

I apologize for my tardy response Hiflier. I have been thinking about how I might answer your questions (and whether or not I could). 1st a disclaimer: I was educated as a paleobiologist. I have studied fossil invertebrate populations with regard to their specific variations (variations within a species due to ontogeny - that is growth from infant to adolescent to adult), parasitism by competing organisms, and evolutionary considerations as they impact our understanding of the genus, family, and order classifications in a particular class of invertebrates. I have taken graduate level courses in genetics and evolution (but a long time ago - invertebrate zoology was one of my two minor subjects), BUT I AM NOT A GENETICIST! So take what I might say with some healthy skepticism - and I welcome discussion from real geneticists (and I am guessing from your questions that you already know most, if not all, of what I am going to say). Some good news: With regard to DNA, hair is amazingly stable in a variety of environments that would be considered risky in other respects. That is mainly due to the presence of cuticle, the outermost hard layer of a three-layered hair shaft (inner medulla, medial cortex, outer cuticle). The cuticle protects the medulla, and the medulla contains a lot of mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA). Some bad news: Nuclear DNA (nDNA or nuDNA) is lost in the process of cornification - in which protein cells become hair. Although many people think that a follicle needs to be attached to a hair shaft for extraction of nDNA, nDNA has occasionally been extracted from the medulla of a hair shaft - sometimes months or even years after the hair has been pulled/shed from a human body - I guess this should be included under the "good news". In most cases the best that one can expect from hair in terms of DNA is mtDNA. mtDNA is not pertinent for ID'ing individuals, but works for ID'ing species (if that species' genome is included in an existing gene bank - and it should be useful as a match for higher classifications as well, such as genus, subfamily, and family). According to at least two hair experts, Sasquatch hair commonly lacks a medulla, and, when present, the Sasquatch medulla is discontinuous and not prominent. A number of mtDNA studies of purported Sasquatch hair have suggested Homo sapiens, and the natural conclusion is human contamination. There are a variety of methods for decontaminating DNA samples, and actually hair, again because of the protective cuticle, is especially prone to successful decontamination. As I have said in other threads, there exist in all know human DNA (ALL HUMAN DNA) genetic markers that are unique to Homo sapiens, so any DNA researcher looking to verify human contamination or to suggest the existence of other than human DNA, must look for one, or a few, of those markers, else he/she is falling short of performing adequate study (trying to be kind here to past researchers - I would rather say #*&@&%$*!). I think study of suspected Sasquatch hair is worth study, without regard to external environmental challenges and without regard to time in environment. I am not like the body of posters on this site (mainly inductive reasoners - some brilliant, some notsomuch) that can run through a myriad of explanations and possibilities addressing a single data point. I am admittedly not brilliant - I am a plodder. I try to gather a lot of data and methodically work through that data to try to understand it (that's a tough thing in this Sasquatch world containing a fair bit of purely anecdotal data). If I were confronted with testing old hair for DNA or making the determination no to do so because conclusive results might be unlikely, I would say do the analysis - one never knows what might turn up (my experience has been the more one learns, the more one realizes there is more to learn). I had planned to address your questions more directly, but I am running out of gas. The subject does interest me, however, and I look forward to more communication with you.

It seems to me that we are being prepped for something related to UFOs by the government. The government does not keep secrets then suddenly start leaking unless someone wants it leaked. Could be a lot of things, but I hope the government have not made some terrible deal and UFOs are going to land soon and demand payment. There are artifacts that science likes to ignore, that could only be alien because in some cases they were found in geologic strata where humans did not exist yet. Science treats them exactly like BF, it ignores them. They are an anachronism which science simply ignores because it cannot explain them. If UFOs have been recovered that is the ultimate artifact. We have no evidence that UFOs are immune to aircraft guns or missiles. In the late 40s and early 50s I think we actually conducted aerial combat with them and both sides had losses. If ETs have not had frequent visitations imagine their surprise if they visited before World War I, then visited after World War II The rapid advance in military aviation would have not happened without those wars. That could have caught ET visitors by surprise not knowing how dangerous we had become.

I disagree in terms of evidence. I see the 411 books as the black hole that puts the wobble in the axis of a star. Is it normal for a special forces detachment to go looking for a lost child? Highly strange! Is it normal for the Park Service to claim they have no list of missing persons gone missing in their own Parks? Highly strange! You could ask the same of any city police force in the US and get such a list. Is it normal for the FBI to get involved in adult missing person cases? No. We live in a age right now, we are being told by our government that UFO’s are real, they fly in our airspace with impunity, they exhibit flight characteristics well beyond our own technology and they do not know what they are. We have no proof UFO’s exist either. But obviously our government has been aware of this phenomenon for sometime and denied it. Or worse told people they saw swamp gas or shooting stars. Do we need a body of a Bigfoot to prove they exist? Yes. Does that mean the government is gonna be blindsided by this revelation? No. And also we have proof of bipedal hominids in our fossil record. It’s fact. We do not have any evidence of an alien species in our fossil record or otherwise. And yet guess which phenomenon our government has admitted being real first? I do not think we are on the same plane as woo folks. We attempt to answer this phenomenon with scientific or a naturalist eye. It does no good to answer a riddle with 5 more riddles. Soemthing is wrong in our forests. Real people are really missing or dead. Many under strange circumstances. Is it Bigfoot? Is it feral humans? Is it aliens? Well, you don’t send armed Green Berets into the Great Smoky mountains because you think someone has drowned or fallen off a cliff!!!? Right? You send in armed Green Berets to deal with direct action threats. Something is posing a direct threat to American citizens..... So what is it? And last I checked aliens and feral humans do not look like upright walking bears. And machine guns do not pose a threat to UFOs.... that travel tens of thousands of feet in nano seconds. Might as well use sling shots and rocks. But your mileage may vary.