Cryptozoologist Loren Coleman Speaks about Melba Ketchum's Bigfoot DNA Study

Loren Coleman, left, speaks with host Joshua Foer at the Institute Library in New Haven.

“My standard is: no data, no discovery, and why is she saying ridiculous things like ‘These are angels from heaven’?” -- Loren Coleman on Melba Ketchum DNA Study

In an article by Randall Beach for the New Haven Register, Loren Coleman is asked about his approach to cryptozoology. You can read below as he describes himself as a skeptic and then brings up Melba Ketchum's Bigfoot DNA study:

Coleman stated at the outset: “I am a skeptic.” He demands to see plenty of hard evidence before believing any of the many claims of creature sighters.

“I try to interview the witness first,” he told us. “I try to understand the human element. The creature is important to me. But I’m never blown away by a piece of evidence. I always look for the motive.”

For instance, he investigated the claim by a veterinarian in Texas she had discovered a being that was “part human, part primitive.”

“My standard is: no data, no discovery,” Coleman said. “And why is she saying ridiculous things like ‘These are angels from heaven’?”

The article continues to talk about a few other cryptids but the subject comes back to Bigfoot and Mr. Coleman reveals what started his fascination for Cryptozoology; a Japanese movie about the Yeti.

Coleman said that for every 100 cases of new animal claims, about 80 of them are mistaken identity, one is a hoax and the other 19 are unknown.

“But the media goes crazy about the hoaxes,” he noted.

Coleman said Bigfoot hoaxers are “really evil people.”

“Let’s talk about Bigfoot,” Foer said, and Coleman was off and running.

He noted that when he surveys people who come to his International Cryptozoology Museum in Portland, Me. (the world’s only cryptozoology museum), “nine out of 10 are interested in Bigfoot.”

Coleman thinks he knows the reason: “Of all the cryptids, Bigfoot is the one that looks the most like us.”

Coleman isn’t about to declare Bigfoot is real but he did say, “I think there is something going on out there.”

He said the most “compelling” evidence is the Patterson-Gimlin footage of a hairy figure shot Oct. 20, 1967, in Bluff Creek, Calif. “You can see the mammary glands,” he noted. “And muscle contractions.”

Coleman added: “You see horses reacting to the creature. You have film, you have footprints. We have to be careful about putting all of our eggs in a basket. But if you look at it now, it’s the gold standard of all Bigfoot films.”

Coleman said we needn’t look for Bigfoot in populated regions such as Connecticut. But he noted: “You’ve got the melon heads in Shelton! Groups of unknown creatures in the woods with giant heads. They’re folk art.”

Coleman said, “I’ve been at this 53 years” and yet cryptozoology is still often dismissed as pseudo science. “I’ve long ago given up my defensiveness.”

He got interested in the field when he was a kid. The date was March 20, 1960. He saw a Japanese documentary, “Half Human,” about the Yeti (the Abominable Snowman).

You can read the full article at the New Haven Register 

Irish Bookie: Thousand to One Odds Irish "Beef" will be Contaminated by Bigfoot

Paddy Power is an Irish Booker and is using a a horse meat scandal to promote their bookings.

“Talk about product innovation; not only can you back horses with Paddy Power but now you can also eat them. This is something our punters can really sink their teeth into.” --Paddy Power

According to the BBC, "On Tuesday, it emerged Irish food inspectors had found almost 30% horsemeat in one brand sold by Tesco. Smaller amounts were also found in beefburgers sold by Iceland, Lidl and Aldi and Dunnes. Officials said the contaminated products - on sale in the UK and the Irish Republic - posed no risk to human health and had been removed from shop shelves."

An online booker of horse races leveraged the shock to provide betting on the next meat to contaminate the Irish beef industry. This included odds for cryptids like Bigfoot and Unicorns; 1000 to 1 and 2000 to 1 odds respectively. See the whole list of odds below.

Next species to contaminate Irish “beef” burgers

2/1 Deer

4/1 Dog

6/1 Rabbit

16/1 Squirrel

33/1 Zebra

40/1 Swan

40/1 Greyhound

100/1 Lion

100/1 Penguin

1000/1 Bigfoot

2000/1 Unicorn

It gets stranger, people actually started betting and they had to take down the page. In other words Bigfoot bets are off.

Screenshot of PattyPower.com: Paddy Power takes down their Bigfoot betting page

You can read an excerpt from the article below:

Paddy Power has decided to cash in on the Tesco horsemeat in beef burgers shenanigans by creating a new bet: what will be next to contaminate beef burgers?

The bet starts off with deer at two to one, and goes all the way up to unicorns at 2000 to one.

Animals in between include cat, swan and penguin.

This is a traditional tongue-in-cheek move from Paddy Power, who also ran a bet on the number of children the Duchess of Cambridge was pregnant with.

However, PaddyPower is not the only brand to jump on the news: Morrisons today tweeted ‘We know where all the beef in our own frozen burgers comes from as we make them all in our own factories and the beef used is 100% British’.

Paddy Power said: “Talk about product innovation; not only can you back horses with Paddy Power but now you can also eat them. This is something our punters can really sink their teeth into.”

SRC: The Drum

Today in Bigfoot History | JAN 19, 1999 | Bob Gimlin Hangs up on Wired Magazine

Bob Gimlin did not even dignify the accusation that the bigfoot in the P/G film was a costume. The arrow points to where skeptics believed a zipper was exposed

"I was there. I saw [Bigfoot]. The film is genuine. Anybody who says different is just trying to make a buck." Bob Gimlin's response to WIRED Magazine before he hung up on them.

This is a "Today in Bigfoot History" update to the zipper story from January 11th. Once Cliff Crook and Chris Murphy claimed to have seen a zipper-like shape on the costume, it created ripples among the community at the time and polarized some bigfooters.

It is ironic Cliff Crook is accusing anybody of an inauthentic picture of Bigfoot.  After all, he was the man behind this picture...

WIRED Magazine did some great journalism, getting reactions from respected P/G film proponents like Ray Crowe and Grover Krantz. They even ask independent imaging experts from Pegasus Imaging and Adobe, who both agreed an anomalous blob can be interpreted as anything.

Ray Crowe summed it up quite nicely comparing the Crook/Murphy analysis to looking for sheep in the shapes of clouds.

You can read the great piece of journalism below.

Sasquatch: Man in a Monkey Suit?

Joseph Rose 01.19.99

YAKIMA, Washington -- The scratchy movie footage shows a big, brown, hairy creature retreating over a stream bed into dense forest. But wait. Is that the glint of a belt buckle on Bigfoot? Or have skeptics gotten carried away with Photoshop?

Loyal Bigfootologists and some computer-imaging experts are giving disapproving grunts to two researchers who claim that a computer analysis of a famous 1967 film shows a man in a monkey suit, not the legendary giant of the Northwest woods.

Bigfoot buffs Cliff Crook of Bothell, Washington, and Chris Murphy of Vancouver, Canada, say enlargements and computer enhancements of the film's frames reveal an object hanging from the fur that resembles metal fasteners used on clothing at the time.

"When the guy in the suit turned to look at the camera, it probably snapped loose and dangled from the fur," said Crook, who has been searching for the elusive creature for 42 years. "It's a hoax. Why would Bigfoot be wearing a belt buckle?"

The claim has howling-mad Bigfoot enthusiasts branding Murphy and Crook as traitors on Internet newsgroups and attempting to discredit their findings as a publicity stunt.

"It's like picking a sheep out of the clouds," said Western Bigfoot Society president Ray Crowe of Portland, Oregon. "They've blown up the images beyond the size of recognition. So, they can pretty much see anything they imagine."

At issue is the footage taken 32 years ago, when Bigfoot trackers Roger Patterson and Bob Gimlin of Yakima were investigating reports of sasquatch footprints in Six Rivers National Forest, near the California-Oregon border. They purportedly spotted a female Bigfoot darting across a sandbar, and Patterson let his 16-mm Kodak movie camera roll.

The minute of jerky, grainy film and the plaster-cast footprints Patterson made that October day became the veritable gold standard for trackers and enthusiasts, the evidence by which all things Bigfoot are measured.

Murphy began questioning the film's validity after discovering an aberration in the footage while helping his son with a class project in 1995. Using a computer, he zoomed in tighter and tighter on the frames, finding what appears to be a glimmering ornate latch in the shape of a bottle opener.

Four sequential computer-scanned frames on the film appear to show the object in motion, said Crook, who reviewed Murphy's findings, which were released 12 January. He said the object appears to be cinching a costume.
Murphy said he's convinced "there's something out of place" in the film. "I have now sent my material to an expert in the [photo-enhancing] field," he wrote in an email.

Steve Armstrong of Tampa, Florida-based Pegasus Imaging said he would like a shot at examining the evidence. He believes the film is such that it wouldn't capture an image of something as small as a buckle. And then there's the bit-mapped nature of digital compression and enlarging.

"Zoom in on an image too much, and you get a lot of blocky artifacts," Armstrong said.

The result, said Jennifer Polanski of Adobe Systems, might be "a blob" that looks something like a belt buckle. Even with Adobe's popular Photoshop software, it's hard to see how someone can take a faraway figure like that in the Patterson-Gimlin film and zoom in on a metal fastener, she said.

In Yakima, on the edge of the wooded east slope of the Cascade Mountains, there have long been rumors that the late Roger Patterson paid a Hollywood costume designer to make the suit and a big Yakima Indian to wear it for the film. Just last week, there was talk that the owner of the suit had hired a local attorney and was getting ready to bring it out of the closet for the world to see. Like the other rumors, that one has yet to be proven true.

While Patterson died years ago, Gimlin, 67, still lives in Yakima. He dismisses the rumors and the new computer analysis as "wacko."

"I was there. I saw [Bigfoot]. The film is genuine," Gimlin said in a telephone interview. "Anybody who says different is just trying to make a buck." And he hung up.

Washington State University anthropologist Grover Krantz, one of Bigfoot's stalwart backers in academia, agrees that the Crook-Murphy analysis is amateurish and irrelevant.

"Look at the way it walks," Krantz said, referring to the figure in the Patterson-Gimlin film. "Even if Patterson had hired someone to get in a suit, there's no way he could have trained him to walk in this manner. I know, I've tried to reconstruct the motion."