Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind Somehow Stuff Works
Speaker 1: dot com. Hey you welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind.
Speaker 1: My name is Robert Lamp and I'm Julie Douglas. Julie,
Speaker 1: do you believe in Sasquatch? Do you believe in dick Foot?
Speaker 1: Did you believe in Bigfoot? Do you believe yet? Day?
Speaker 1: The question? I know. I know as a kid, I
Speaker 1: really really really wanted Bigfoot to be real. I have
Speaker 1: to say I feel pretty skeptical about the YETI the
Speaker 1: sasquatch existing. Yeah, I'm kind of in the same boat.
Speaker 1: I always think back to the two thousand and eight
Speaker 1: Georgia Bigfoot hoax, particularly because that was my I was
Speaker 1: I pretty much just started at how stuff works. So
Speaker 1: my life suddenly had a lot more science in it
Speaker 1: than than ever before because it wasn't just stuff I
Speaker 1: was reading on the side. It was my job. And uh,
Speaker 1: until you know, immersed in science is suddenly the all
Speaker 1: over the internet and on the TVs. It was like
Speaker 1: a slow newsweek. I think, um, they're they're all these
Speaker 1: stories out of Georgia, the state we are in um
Speaker 1: where apparently a car salesman by the name of Rick
Speaker 1: Dyer and a then police officer by the name of
Speaker 1: Matt Wouldn't claimed to have a big foot corps on
Speaker 1: ice and a cooler, and it was and it just
Speaker 1: escalated from there. It because there was a news conference
Speaker 1: in California, and for a brief little sliver of time
Speaker 1: there it was it was kind of to be cliche.
Speaker 1: It was an amazing time to be alive, because because
Speaker 1: it seemed possible that we might be about to know
Speaker 1: for sure that there are sasquatches out there, that there
Speaker 1: are bigfoots, skunk gates, whatever we want we want to
Speaker 1: call them, and uh, and even though I doubted it,
Speaker 1: I was, I gave into the temptation to really want
Speaker 1: to believe. And of course then we found out that
Speaker 1: it was just a sasquatch costume stuff with possum road
Speaker 1: kill and slaughter house leftovers. But but for just a
Speaker 1: little while, Catrick our imagination. You know, to what degree
Speaker 1: did they think they were going to pull that off?
Speaker 1: That's what I'm wondering, Like, why go through the trouble
Speaker 1: of stuffing the innerds with with leftover meats? And well,
Speaker 1: I was reading about it. I've I've read interpretations where
Speaker 1: it's just kind of like a joke that got out
Speaker 1: of control um and quickly was just out of hand.
Speaker 1: I've also read some criticisms to say that one of
Speaker 1: the individuals involved was really hoping to get some more
Speaker 1: business for sort of wilderness tours in the area, so
Speaker 1: you know, a little column and a little calm by
Speaker 1: and maybe they themselves were kind of given into the
Speaker 1: lust for sasquat reality as well. Well. I think of
Speaker 1: the beginnings, at least in terms of the of arresting
Speaker 1: the public's imagination on this topic, is being that I
Speaker 1: think it's sixty four sixteen millimeter footage that was shot
Speaker 1: by Roger Patterson and Bob Gillan excuse me, it was
Speaker 1: the nineteen six seven and everybody is probably familiar with
Speaker 1: his grainy black and white footage. Yeah, And but you
Speaker 1: know the thing is, if you're looking for it on YouTube,
Speaker 1: there's so many different versions of its CG to to
Speaker 1: to lose track of the original, which I'll be sure
Speaker 1: to to share when this publishes. But the original is
Speaker 1: really haunting because like the first several minutes of it
Speaker 1: are just dudes riding around on horseback. You're just looking
Speaker 1: at the woods, and there's that click click click click
Speaker 1: click click click. Uh, you know kind of sound is
Speaker 1: that the film processes through and then you see this
Speaker 1: creature sort of you know, doing that that saunter across
Speaker 1: the clearing in the woods and uh. And it's been
Speaker 1: parodied so many times that it tends to lose any
Speaker 1: kind of impact on a modern viewer. But I find
Speaker 1: going back to that original film and watching it from
Speaker 1: the beginning and then having the the the mysterious creature
Speaker 1: gradually appear, you recapture perhaps some of the original excitement
Speaker 1: people found in that footage. Yeah, I mean, because what
Speaker 1: you're talking about is that half human, half ape like
Speaker 1: creature just ambling out of a stream bed in the
Speaker 1: Six Rivers National Forests in northern californ On As you say,
Speaker 1: it's not you know, they're just kind of moving along
Speaker 1: there on horseback. It's the footage is just sort of
Speaker 1: oh care nature. Although they are going after the sasquatch,
Speaker 1: that is what they're into, was when they were actually
Speaker 1: filming this. If that's certainly worth noting. It's not just
Speaker 1: a matter of out and then there's a sasquatch and
Speaker 1: we happen to see the sasquatch. So of course, there's
Speaker 1: there's much debate about this film whether or not it's
Speaker 1: actually someone in a guerrilla suit um, and we we're
Speaker 1: not going to get into all of these sort of
Speaker 1: whether or not this film is um real or not,
Speaker 1: because people are still analyzing it and making arguments in
Speaker 1: both directions. I do want to say real quick, the
Speaker 1: term sasquatch is a Silish word from the Salish people
Speaker 1: in other Native American people's of the Alaskan, Yukon and
Speaker 1: parts of British Columbia, and it essentially means wild man.
Speaker 1: But they're also like over a hundred and fifty different
Speaker 1: local names for this shaggy bipedal creature. And in the
Speaker 1: original myths they would also say that it could be
Speaker 1: fift high. Nowadays, when people were talking about seth Watch,
Speaker 1: they couldn't make an argument more and they're like the
Speaker 1: seven to nine foot range. Yeah, and this has been
Speaker 1: reported all over the world. Yeah, you have some variation
Speaker 1: of it for Antarctica, Wellarica, but so you have you
Speaker 1: have you have the eddies in the Himalayas, the skunk
Speaker 1: apes in Arkansas and Mississippi, you have the Siberian almasty,
Speaker 1: you have the Chinese year in or wild man um.
Speaker 1: You have the Cherokee suel calu anywhere you look. And
Speaker 1: when you get into the wild man myths to the
Speaker 1: idea that they're wild men in the forest, you go
Speaker 1: back to thirteen through sixteenth century Europeans. They believed in
Speaker 1: wild men in the woods. Uh. And then there's a
Speaker 1: you can find a compelling argument that essentially the big
Speaker 1: foot myth takes over for us as we as we
Speaker 1: encounter Darwin's theory of evolution. Uh, the idea that we
Speaker 1: couldn't possibly be werewolves anymore, that with the werewolf, can
Speaker 1: no longer be go to representation of our be steel
Speaker 1: shadows cell. Instead we need this other form. Okay, So
Speaker 1: Darwin came online and people are like, all right, here's
Speaker 1: the deal. Were wolves they're out yet he's in, Yeah,
Speaker 1: we're not. Really, we're not descended from wolves. We're descended
Speaker 1: from apes. And so therefore an ape is a better
Speaker 1: avatar for a be steel self. But then again, like
Speaker 1: I said, people were we're seeing uh reporting wild men
Speaker 1: in the woods long before Darwin came around. So I
Speaker 1: don't think it's the most compelling argument, but it's interesting
Speaker 1: to think about. So the idea of a sasquatch is
Speaker 1: interesting to me for a couple of reasons. One as
Speaker 1: I feel like it's really come to symbolize humans pension
Speaker 1: for logical fallacies. So, you know, believers in Bigfoot would
Speaker 1: claim that the absence of hard evidence of Bigfoot is
Speaker 1: not evidence that Bigfoot does not exist. This is the argument, right,
Speaker 1: And this is all kind of created this cottage industry
Speaker 1: of sincerely earnest people trying to ferret out the truth
Speaker 1: among pranksters and hoaxes. So it sort of money is
Speaker 1: all the water here. You have people that really want
Speaker 1: to believe Eve and want to find actual proof and
Speaker 1: prove it. You have people who want to believe and
Speaker 1: are willing to just cling to whatever. You have people
Speaker 1: who just want to make a hoax. And then you
Speaker 1: have people who really want to apply the rigors of
Speaker 1: science to it or are already of the opinion that
Speaker 1: we've already done that, and they're more pressing things to
Speaker 1: consider right in the absence again of any body essentially
Speaker 1: um And then I think you can't help to think
Speaker 1: that somehow and all of this it sort of stirs
Speaker 1: that childlike wonder, right, and that you know, there's somewhere
Speaker 1: inside of us. There's just an iota of hope that
Speaker 1: this nine to twelve foot harry mammal, you know, peaceably
Speaker 1: roams the hinterlands, right, And I think about it as
Speaker 1: being sort of a mash up between Chewbacca and where
Speaker 1: the wild things are. These are these are things from
Speaker 1: my youth and from my memory, my imagination, all embodied
Speaker 1: in what Bigfoot is. Yeah, because the idea is that
Speaker 1: there is this almost magical creature. I mean, most no
Speaker 1: one out there that's you know, a sasquattion just saying
Speaker 1: it's a magical creature, the saying it's a natural creature.
Speaker 1: But there's something magical about the idea that there is
Speaker 1: this uh, this cousin of humanity that still lives wild
Speaker 1: and naked and furry in portions of the world that
Speaker 1: we haven't turned into a parking lot yet, and that
Speaker 1: they're so good at what they're doing that we have
Speaker 1: really no proof that they're there, that they're they're almost
Speaker 1: like a forest god living in the woods. And while
Speaker 1: there are stories out there of of of a sasquatch
Speaker 1: or a Bigfoot or what have you being aggressive towards humans,
Speaker 1: most of the encounters, you seem to come across their
Speaker 1: more mundane, they're more peaceful. And you see these representations,
Speaker 1: for instance, the Melbourne Catchum Global Sasquatch Foundation. We'll discuss
Speaker 1: that a little later on. But their emblem is is
Speaker 1: this wonderful cheesey emblem of the planet Earth. And then
Speaker 1: there's the outline of a sasquatch on there, and the
Speaker 1: sasquatch is raising one hand, kind of like the figure
Speaker 1: on the Voyager, that sort of I come in peace
Speaker 1: sort of thing, and I I laughed the image, but
Speaker 1: it does sum up I feel like a lot of
Speaker 1: the hopes uh and and dreams out there when it
Speaker 1: comes to belief or the desire to believe in a sasquatch.
Speaker 1: It's a little bit of a Kauaii hangover, you know.
Speaker 1: I was just thinking about the World Wildlife Fund, and
Speaker 1: I believe their logo is a panda, which is super
Speaker 1: and cuddly, but if you go up to a panda,
Speaker 1: it will mally you. Right. So again, these are ideas
Speaker 1: about things that exist that don't exist, perhaps exist, And
Speaker 1: for me, what is again interesting about all of this
Speaker 1: is that it kind of brings up this question of
Speaker 1: could there be a species of primate behind these legends.
Speaker 1: So not necessarily sasquatch or YETI as we we think
Speaker 1: of it, but maybe something to this. That's the question
Speaker 1: that that is interesting about this. Yeah, and it is
Speaker 1: a reasonable question. It's it's easy to get distracted by
Speaker 1: all of the nonsense out there. You lose sight of
Speaker 1: the fact that, Okay, nine foot gigantopithecus creature did exist. Uh,
Speaker 1: you know in prehistoric times that we do have guerrillas
Speaker 1: to this day. So, and there are portions of the
Speaker 1: world that that are there are more of a wilderness,
Speaker 1: particularly you're looking in like northern North America or a
Speaker 1: Siberian region. Uh, certainly parts of the Himalayas. Uh, you know,
Speaker 1: deep jungles. There are places where you could conceivably have
Speaker 1: a species, even a nine foot tall eight man species
Speaker 1: living outside of a human understanding. Doubtful, but possible. Doubt
Speaker 1: but possible. Yeah, you're not arguing of flying unicorns. You're
Speaker 1: arguing something that tends to make sense, uh, based on
Speaker 1: what we know about the natural world. In two thousand
Speaker 1: and two, the world's perhaps the most famous primatologist, Jane Goodall,
Speaker 1: came out as a I guess you could say bigfoot enthusiast. Yes,
Speaker 1: if not someone who really hopes that this is the case.
Speaker 1: And uh so she does admit to being a romantic
Speaker 1: and having very much a heartfelt feeling about she She
Speaker 1: said during the interview with Ira Flatau of MPR Science
Speaker 1: Friday that she was sure of it. Now she's just
Speaker 1: kind of talking off the cuff here in this interview. Yeah,
Speaker 1: she's not presenting a paper on it. She's just he said,
Speaker 1: he said that happening. She was like, oh, hey, um,
Speaker 1: and so this is what she she said. She said,
Speaker 1: I've talked to so many Native Americans who all described
Speaker 1: the same sounds to who have seen them. I've probably
Speaker 1: got about oh thirty books that have come from different
Speaker 1: parts of the world, from China, from all over the place.
Speaker 1: And there was a little tiny snippet in the newspaper
Speaker 1: just last last week which says that British scientists have
Speaker 1: found what they believed to be a yetty hair and
Speaker 1: that the scientists in the Natural History Museum in London
Speaker 1: couldn't identify it as any known animal. So we'll discuss
Speaker 1: more about DNA in a little bit. But she goes,
Speaker 1: as you say, on to say that she is a romantic.
Speaker 1: She she um. She also says it's strange that there
Speaker 1: has never been a single authentic hide or hair of
Speaker 1: the big Foot, So she is acknowledging in a skeptical
Speaker 1: way like we don't really have the evidence. But at
Speaker 1: the heart of this, again, I think, is that childlike
Speaker 1: wonder of like maybe it could be. So. Now, another
Speaker 1: individual that that came up when we were looking at actual, legitimate,
Speaker 1: learned individual scientists who are interested in the possible existence
Speaker 1: of Bigfoot is Jeff Meldrum. Now, Jeff Meldrum is Associate
Speaker 1: Professor of anatomy and Anthropology at Idaho State University UH.
Speaker 1: He's a research associate at the I have A Museum
Speaker 1: of Natural History, and he's his areas of research are
Speaker 1: primate functional morphography, paleontology, but also crypto zoology as well. Now, um,
Speaker 1: crypto zoology for anyone who isn't familiar with the term,
Speaker 1: we have zoology, which is that dealing with actual, UH
Speaker 1: creatures that are known to exist documented. Cryptozoo Zoology is
Speaker 1: concerned with creatures that we do not know actually exist. There,
Speaker 1: you know, you're things like your locknoest monsters, you're your
Speaker 1: your Bigfoot, monster, what have you? So Meldrum is interest
Speaker 1: in cryptozoology, he's interested in big Foot, but he is
Speaker 1: also he also has the science shops to back it up.
Speaker 1: He he is well informed about how the body of
Speaker 1: a large primate works and would work if it were
Speaker 1: in the form of the sasquash. That's right, because he
Speaker 1: knows all about primate locomotion, human look emotion, and so
Speaker 1: he has analyzed the footprints and he thinks that the
Speaker 1: way that that the foot seems to be uh designed,
Speaker 1: is that it's very well maybe a divergent species, and
Speaker 1: so that's that's interesting. Um. He gets a lot of
Speaker 1: flak for this, by the way, Yeah, as I imagine
Speaker 1: he would. Yeah. Um, But you know he's out there
Speaker 1: on the record saying, look, it's not just the footprints.
Speaker 1: I've examined that footage um from nineteen sixty seven. He says,
Speaker 1: you can see muscle movements, you can see the shoulder
Speaker 1: blade slide under the skin, you can see tendons attaching
Speaker 1: to joints and so forth. He says, the already is
Speaker 1: really much better than most people have acknowledged in the past.
Speaker 1: So again he's talking about that iconic film footage, which
Speaker 1: which I do after researching this podcast, I do agree
Speaker 1: that that we tend to just dismiss that footage these
Speaker 1: days because it has been lampooned so much, and it
Speaker 1: is has been ridicule and I've really become a joke.
Speaker 1: And I'm not saying if you look back at it,
Speaker 1: it's definitely going to convince you or anything. But if
Speaker 1: you if you just put all that aside, all your
Speaker 1: all these preconceived notions, and you watch the footage, fake
Speaker 1: or not, it's it's far more effective than we often
Speaker 1: give it credit. I agree. I also wanted to point
Speaker 1: out it's a gigantapithecus, the giant ape that you had discussed.
Speaker 1: This is this kind of gives us a clue about
Speaker 1: the limits of primate morphology. Right, so there is the
Speaker 1: possibility that you could have a nine foot tall mammal
Speaker 1: by three ft wide that you can't say that's not
Speaker 1: a possibility. It's we know that this is a kind
Speaker 1: of morphology that has exists it in the past. However,
Speaker 1: Michael Schermer will talk about these these different animals that
Speaker 1: we have discovered, and he'll will say that the reason
Speaker 1: cryptods merit our attention is that enough successful discoveries have
Speaker 1: been made by scientists based on local anecdotes and folklore
Speaker 1: that we cannot dismiss all claims a priori. So he says,
Speaker 1: the most famous examples include the gorilla. Actually in um
Speaker 1: we see the old copy that was a short necked
Speaker 1: relative of the draft commodo dragon in nineteen twelve, the bonobo. Uh.
Speaker 1: He goes on and on and on, but he says,
Speaker 1: there is one thing that is common, a common thread
Speaker 1: in all these discoveries. They have a body. It Yeah,
Speaker 1: like like another one. He mentions, of course, this cryptosol
Speaker 1: just loved to point at the ninety eight the discovery
Speaker 1: of a sila can that's in a species of archaic
Speaker 1: looking fish, and that we used to think it had
Speaker 1: gone extinct in the pitatious period, and then here it is.
Speaker 1: But to his point, we had a sela can to
Speaker 1: show off. Here's a gorilla, here's a sela can, here's
Speaker 1: a panda. And as Shermer points out in a two
Speaker 1: thousand three essay for Scientific American, uh, that's the big thing.
Speaker 1: Here show me the body. Where is the body? Because
Speaker 1: anytime we were classifying a new species, we need a holotype.
Speaker 1: We need the body of the creature. We need a
Speaker 1: specimen by which to go on to say here's what
Speaker 1: we found and here's another one. Oh, we can can
Speaker 1: we can compare uh the d n A here, we
Speaker 1: can compare the morphology of these two species and say
Speaker 1: this is this and it's not these other specimens. Okay,
Speaker 1: so we've discussed a bit about the case for the
Speaker 1: existence of bigfoot sasquatch yetti. Let's take a quick break,
Speaker 1: and when we get back we will talk about the
Speaker 1: case against it. All Right, we're back, you know, and
Speaker 1: I want to mention real quick, but Melvioun when he's
Speaker 1: talking about the tracks and prints and and even the
Speaker 1: uh that famous bit of footage, he's really all about
Speaker 1: the sasquatch, and he even admits that the case for
Speaker 1: the yetti in the Himalays is far less impressive. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and we'll get a bit into the Eddie and the
Speaker 1: Himalays and the reasons why that is problematic in a moment.
Speaker 1: But let's go back to this idea of you know,
Speaker 1: show us the body, or show us some sort of
Speaker 1: evidence that that gives us an idea that this species exists. Yeah,
Speaker 1: to uh to Jane Goodall's point, it is incredible that
Speaker 1: if this creature were to actually exists, that we don't
Speaker 1: have any proof of it, that we don't have bodies
Speaker 1: and we don't have a significant samples of their anatomy. Uh. Now,
Speaker 1: the the that would have in my mind, that tends
Speaker 1: to lead to the answer, well, that's because they don't exist,
Speaker 1: and or they did exist, they have not existed in
Speaker 1: a very long time. But uh but yeah, what are
Speaker 1: we what are we to make of that? Because it's
Speaker 1: because especially now, it's one thing to say, you know,
Speaker 1: early twenty century, but now this is the twenty one century.
Speaker 1: There are more humans round than ever before, and just
Speaker 1: about all of them have a camera on them. Because
Speaker 1: I said the other that's a whole other issue that
Speaker 1: the camera footage. But just about everyone has a camera.
Speaker 1: Where we're out all over the place. Why haven't we
Speaker 1: discovered a body? Well, I will play Devil's advocate for
Speaker 1: just one second and say that, you know, every once
Speaker 1: in a while you get the undiscovered tribe, right, so
Speaker 1: you know that there are pockets of people out there,
Speaker 1: maybe even a new species that just has not been
Speaker 1: discovered yet in the rainforest in the Amazon between two
Speaker 1: thousand and ten and two thousand and thirteen, there were
Speaker 1: four d forty one species of plants and animals that
Speaker 1: were discovered. How many of them were nine ft tall?
Speaker 1: That's the problem. Yeah, we're talking about a big creature
Speaker 1: that would would need a larger area in which to roam.
Speaker 1: Uh And and we just haven't seen it. We have
Speaker 1: not seen it happen. Again, not saying it it's impossible
Speaker 1: for it to exist. But when you start looking at
Speaker 1: the details, the size of the creature, how much space
Speaker 1: it would need and uh and in the various parts
Speaker 1: of the world in which it's reported to have been anist,
Speaker 1: then I feel like the case just grows less and
Speaker 1: less impressive. But then you have someone like Melba Ketchum
Speaker 1: who is saying, hey, here is some possible proof, or
Speaker 1: even saying there is proof species exists. Yes, tex And
Speaker 1: veterinarian Dr. Melba s Ketchum uh contends that her research
Speaker 1: teams five year genome sequencing study of a hundred and
Speaker 1: twenty to alleged bigfoot DNA samples because they are tufts
Speaker 1: of hair and whatnot that have been collected by by
Speaker 1: bigfoot hair hunters out there in the wild Anyway, she
Speaker 1: says that she claims that their findings point to a
Speaker 1: hybrid species that split from Homo sapiens and an unknown
Speaker 1: hominid species some thirteen thousand years ago. Now she published
Speaker 1: her results. Yes, now you you probably have not heard
Speaker 1: of the scientific journal that published them, uh DiNovo Scientific
Speaker 1: Journalists what is called because it did not exist before
Speaker 1: publishing this study, and her catch them study is the
Speaker 1: only study that it has ever published. Um So it
Speaker 1: was not pure reviewed. It did not show up in
Speaker 1: any of the normal scientific journals that we would mention
Speaker 1: on this this podcast. So this kind of a red flag.
Speaker 1: And critics have charged that her samples were likely contaminated
Speaker 1: because you have inexperienced evidence gatherers out there that are
Speaker 1: end up introducing their own DNA onto the animal samples
Speaker 1: that they bring in. There sneezing, their coughing, they're breathing heavily,
Speaker 1: what have you. They So they bring in a contaminated
Speaker 1: sample which then wants is analyze. You end up with
Speaker 1: confusing and misleading results. So again, the problem with this
Speaker 1: is starting at the assumption that, um, that the animal
Speaker 1: exists right right, and and that's clear from the get
Speaker 1: go just by you know, just go to her website,
Speaker 1: looks at the logo, look at the mission statement of
Speaker 1: the organization, and you see that that they have they
Speaker 1: have an intention in mind. Yeah. Daniel Laxon, he's a
Speaker 1: co author of the book A Vulnerable Science Origins of
Speaker 1: the Yetti NeSSI and other famous criptis, says quote. A
Speaker 1: scientist generally starts with a conservative working assumption that proposed
Speaker 1: new idea are not true. This is so important, right,
Speaker 1: We've talked about it so over and over again, or
Speaker 1: that hypothetical new entities do not exist, and then revises
Speaker 1: her probability estimate upwards only when the evidence forces her
Speaker 1: to do so, he says. A pseudo scientist, on the
Speaker 1: other hand, typically starts with the assumption that a novel
Speaker 1: pro puzzle seems to be true, and then revises her
Speaker 1: probability downward as the evidence leaves her no choice if
Speaker 1: she is willing to surrender the possibility to do to
Speaker 1: any degree at all. So we've talked about cognitive bias
Speaker 1: all the time. This idea that we continue to sort
Speaker 1: of add weight to this argument that we really want
Speaker 1: to be true, and we begin to assemble patterns where
Speaker 1: sometimes there are none exactly. So yeah, as you go
Speaker 1: into into this kind of study with the cryptozologist mindset,
Speaker 1: with the idea that I really want the big foot
Speaker 1: to be to exist, then that ends up I mean
Speaker 1: that that's the mission statement for the study, that ends
Speaker 1: up skewing the entire study. So no much, no matter
Speaker 1: how much science you throw in after the fact, you've
Speaker 1: already turned the steering wheel off the road. All right,
Speaker 1: So we've talked about the you know, things that have
Speaker 1: existed been discovered. The body showed up, Um, what if
Speaker 1: what if the species is? It does exist but it's
Speaker 1: not what we think it is. There's another explanation, yes,
Speaker 1: and this, uh, this explanation just recently came out in
Speaker 1: the news and it has to do with Oxford University
Speaker 1: geneticist Brian Sykes. Now Sykes his investigations are going to
Speaker 1: be featured in an upcoming Channel four documentary series. He's
Speaker 1: writing a book, um called the Yetie Enigma at DNA
Speaker 1: Detective Story And basically, uh, he put out the call
Speaker 1: and said, all right, you have samples of your yetis,
Speaker 1: your sasquatches, what have you? Send them to me and
Speaker 1: we and we will analyze them. We will look at
Speaker 1: the DNA evidence here and and and then you can
Speaker 1: stop complaining about scientists not listening to your bigfoot stories,
Speaker 1: because I'm here to listen. Just send me the stuff, right.
Speaker 1: So they took two of the more promising samples of
Speaker 1: what we're supposed to be uh, you know, supposed to
Speaker 1: be yetty hair yetti yet yettie materials. Uh, and they
Speaker 1: analyzed them and what they found was pretty incredible, though
Speaker 1: not incredible in the way that cryptozoologists would want it
Speaker 1: to be. No, because again, here's the thing about sciences
Speaker 1: that in the scientific method sometimes it yields results that
Speaker 1: you never imagined, completely different than what you thought would happen. So, yeah,
Speaker 1: he called through the gen Bank database and he found
Speaker 1: that two samples were a match with the DNA of
Speaker 1: an ancient polar bear from small Bard, Norway, and that
Speaker 1: polar bear lifts some one to forty thousand years ago,
Speaker 1: just when the brown bear and the polar bear were
Speaker 1: diverging as a separate species. So there you go, one possible,
Speaker 1: one possible explanation for the belief in the yetti. Yeah,
Speaker 1: perhaps what what people were experiencing all these uh these
Speaker 1: years and seeing into sharing stories about passing down from
Speaker 1: generation generation. It actually had to do with a bear
Speaker 1: that lived up, a species of polar bear that lived
Speaker 1: in the region. Yeah. Now, he said that we shouldn't
Speaker 1: take these results and assume the ancient polar bears are
Speaker 1: wandering around the Himalayas. Um. But he did say that
Speaker 1: perhaps the yet he could be this hybrid of polar
Speaker 1: bear and brown bear, essentially a new species of animal. Um.
Speaker 1: He has not published his research yet. It's up for
Speaker 1: peer review, and there are some people who are criticizing
Speaker 1: it only because of the logistics, saying that what we
Speaker 1: know of polar bears, we know that they would have
Speaker 1: a hard time surviving in the Himalayas, right, and Small
Speaker 1: Bard is a long ways away from the Himalayas, right.
Speaker 1: So there there are aspects to it that I think
Speaker 1: need to be sussed out. But it's interesting. Well, I
Speaker 1: have a theory here. The Yeties existed and they used
Speaker 1: polar bears imported from Small Bard if their steeds, so
Speaker 1: they wrote around on them and you know, wage war
Speaker 1: and intended their mountain farms. I was just thinking maybe
Speaker 1: they use him as pelts and made little coats put
Speaker 1: over their own hairy bodies. Well maybe they were they
Speaker 1: had naked bodies, or it may be clever, and maybe
Speaker 1: they were actually short, more human size. Maybe they were
Speaker 1: just they were just dudes, like two of them, so
Speaker 1: they were like one once on the other shoulders and
Speaker 1: then they had a little polar bear suit that they
Speaker 1: pulled over it. It sounds pretty good to me. Peer reviewed,
Speaker 1: my friend. Yeah, it's officially peer reviewed, all right. So
Speaker 1: there you have it. A brief entry into the world
Speaker 1: of the sasquatch, the big Foot, the yetie, etcetera. Obviously,
Speaker 1: this is a topic that one can spend a lot
Speaker 1: of time on. You can spend a lot of time
Speaker 1: on it just on the scientific side of things, and
Speaker 1: if you want to wander over into the the non
Speaker 1: scientific side of things, uh, there's even more time to
Speaker 1: be wasted. So if you want to spend more time
Speaker 1: with this topic, I would recommend you check out our
Speaker 1: sister podcast and UH and video series stuff. They don't
Speaker 1: want you to know. They frequently come back to the
Speaker 1: big foot issue and they're going to approach it from
Speaker 1: a less skeptic standpoint, but but not like a completely
Speaker 1: nutty standpoint either, No, and I think they will bring
Speaker 1: up some very interesting ideas actually point in caterpoint ideas.
Speaker 1: So check it out. Yeah, all right, and if you
Speaker 1: want to talk to us about Bigfoot, we would love
Speaker 1: to hear from you, seriously if you have I mean
Speaker 1: a lot of the Bigfoot story, a lot of the
Speaker 1: the Eddy story. It a lot of it comes down
Speaker 1: to personal encounters. And you know, we've talked before in
Speaker 1: the past about the flawed nature of memory, the flawed
Speaker 1: nature of paranormal experience. Uh. Michael Sherman that we mentioned earlier,
Speaker 1: who was talking about, you know, his skepticism regarding the
Speaker 1: Big Smith. I mean, he himself and had a paranormal
Speaker 1: experience during a bike marathon and which he saw extraterrestrials
Speaker 1: and that kind of that led to his examination of
Speaker 1: why did I see that? What led to that experience?
Speaker 1: Because I know it wasn't aliens and and and so
Speaker 1: his entire career as a skeptic author has has risen
Speaker 1: from that. So because he was under extreme physical extreme
Speaker 1: physical physical arrest, and he had that cultural script already
Speaker 1: in mind. So if you have a story about big Foot,
Speaker 1: send it to us. We're not going to pick it
Speaker 1: to pieces on the air. We're not gonna call you
Speaker 1: foolish or anything, because again, I really want, I would
Speaker 1: really wish that this were true. And and even if
Speaker 1: there is no such things, is a big foot. Experiences
Speaker 1: of the big Foot are are real. Those do occur
Speaker 1: like we do have paranormal experiences, even if the reason
Speaker 1: for the occurring lies entirely within the natural world. So
Speaker 1: share your stories with us. We'd love to hear from.
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