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| Dr. Bryan Sykes |
In a previous post we shared some reporting from Black Bag's Matthew Phelan regarding criticism by Matt Moneymaker. Matt Moneymaker was quoted as saying the Sykes bigfoot DNA study was meaningless scientifically.
Since our post, Matt Moneymaker Calls Sykes' Bigfoot DNA Study "Meaningless", Matthew Phelan was able to get a response to Matt Moneymakers comments from Dr. Bryan Sykes.
Here is the correspondence between Black Bag and Sykes:
Black Bag: This is to Moneymaker, specifically, but Sykes may know something too: Moneymaker says that the "BFRO did not provide any of the North American samples, nor did we endorse those few samples from North America that were focused on in the associated TV program." UK Channel 4's Bigfoot Files, presumably. Is this, in fact, correct? Further, to Moneymaker, why did the BFRO not submit samples?Check out what else Dr. Bryan Sykes has to say about funding bigfoot research and the three questions we should ask when pursuing Bigfoot in the Black Bag
Sykes: I really don't know whether any of the samples arrived thanks to the BFRO or not. They were all submitted by individuals and not by organisations.
Black Bag: Moneymaker asserts that a substantial portion of the submitted samples were excluded "because there was a relatively small amount of material in the sample (i.e. only a few hairs in the sample ... like MOST authentic bigfoot hair samples)." Dr. Sykes, can you speak to the veracity of this and —- overall —- explain in more detail the rubric by which those 18 samples were excluded?
Sykes: Not so. Many samples consisted of only very few, sometimes a single, hair. I had a slight preference for samples with two or more hairs simply because if I had found any to be from an "anomalous primate" I would have had an independent lab test them before publishing the results. That turned out not be necessary. All told I was sent 95 hair samples of which I sent 37 (now 38) for analysis of which 30 (now 31) yielded DNA.
