Thom Powell Drinks the Ketchum Kool-Aid

Thom offers up a tasting of the Ketchum Kool-Aid

"If that makes me a “Ketchum supporter” then, yes, I guess I drank the Kool-Aid. All I can say is, it was delicious." -- Thom Powell

There is no doubt that Bigfoot Lunch Club is a friend of Bigfoot author, Thom Powell. Heck I even illustrated the cover of his best selling Bigfoot book Shady Neighbors. I am also a huge fan of his previous must-have book The Locals. Click the following link to buy either of his Bigfoot books.

Due to Thom Powell's books he is on record for reporting many of the Bigfoot phenomena before they became mainstream conversations--mainstream among bigfooters anyway. While not everybody "bought" into these topics we still discuss them; topics like infrasound, cover-ups, habituation and yes, even Bigfoot DNA. Thom Powell is no hack when it comes to the topic, he has given a lot of thought to it and clearly has made his own conclusions. 

Thom and I talked about the topic of his recent post, "Bigfoot DNA Evidence Redux" a full week before he posted it. We didn't agree much over the phone, but if I'm honest, his blog post affords him greater ability to make his points. Points of which I still disagree with, but I do have some favorite parts. I loved his synopsis.

OK, so here it is in a nutshell: 109 samples were obtained from all over North America.
(Obviously, the sasquatch phenomenon is more widespread than most people realize.) Most samples were hair, but not all. Blood, saliva, and even a tissue sample was analyzed. Not all of the work was done by a single lab. Some of it was farmed out to university labs that were not initially given any background about the samples they were asked to examine.

The findings were remarkably consistent: mtDNA (mitochondrial DNA), which is indicative of the female component of the genome, came back as human! The nDNA (nuclear DNA from the male progenitor) was found to be ‘novel’, which is geneticist code for “doesn’t match anything previously extracted.”  Also, large sections of the DNA strands appeared as single strand molecules (haploid), as opposed to the uniformly double-stranded DNA of all human DNA that is not found in sex cells (gametes). This might indicate that the DNA being sequenced was highly degraded DNA, but degraded DNA is found to contain lots of bacteria, and no bacteria was found in conjunction with the DNA that showed single strand configuration.  It was not degraded, but it was single strand DNA in about half of the segments that were sequenced. Multiple labs observed this anomaly, an[d] dutifully reported it to Ketchum.

It is the last sentence that I find troublesome. Does it matter that Ketchum was dutiful?

In another paragraph from his post, Thom and I absolutely agree that Ketchum's study can be vindicated if she allowed other scientist to replicate her work.

I suggested to Dr. Ketchum that vindication of her work will only happen when it is replicated by another study, maybe even more than one. She wholeheartedly agreed. We are told that Dr. Bryan Sykes at Cambridge is already on it. Meanwhile, Ketchum has complete confidence that her methodology and her result will withstand the test of time and scientific scrutiny, if scientists will just look objectively at her work.

There are a few parts where the post seems like a Valentine to Ketchum, but I have been known to fawn over personalities myself; namely Cliff Barackman, Sharon Hill and Thom Powell himself. My biggest concern regarding Thom Powell's post is that people will miss his reference to Chapter 10: “No Stone Left Unturned.” of The Locals.

This is where Thom impresses (and inspires) me most, with his own studies and thoughts compiled from many sources.

There is one final doozy of a stone that is still unturned.  It’s sort of the eight hundred pound gorilla in the room that nobody wants to talk about...

I’m referring to the other half of the sasquatch genome that the Ketchum study identified; the part that isn’t human. The sasquatch genome, according to the Ketchum’s work, is human DNA that interspersed with DNA that is absolutely unknown.  It is neither ape, nor human, not lemur.  Ketchum has no idea what it is, nor does anyone else, but the ‘novel’, single strand, haploid DNA is there for anyone to find who knows how to sequence it. Is it some evolutionary offshoot of humanity that we have yet to identify in the fossil record?  Maybe. But the mysterious sequences are single strand, that is haploid DNA, and all terrestrial DNA in somatic cells (blood, hair, tissue, bone) is diploid unless it is in gametes (sex cells).

OK, so what is the origin of this truly novel DNA that Melba Ketchum found in the sasquatch genome? For one possible answer, check out The Locals, Chapter 10: “No Stone Left Unturned.”  What gave me a chill when I read the Ketchum study is the possibility that I may have written down an answer ten years before I even asked this question.

Read Thom's complete post regarding his thoughts on the Ketchum Study at ThomSquatch. While you are there buy his Bigfoot Books too.

Stay tuned. Tomorrow I will publish a thoughtful letter sent to us from a Ketchum advocate!