Robert Lindsay: Dr. Melba Ketchum Bigfoot DNA paper is good

Blogger Robert Lindsay has read Dr. Melba Ketchum's entire 63 page Bigfoot DNA paper. Lindsay isn't a geneticist, but he has done a great job at breaking things down for the Layman. Although it may appear that Ketchum has completely botched the paper, Lindsay believes the attacks are uncalled-for and everyone should take a closer look, and see that Ketchum may be onto something, and she may in fact, be the 'sacrificial lamb' for proving the existence of Bigfoot. "Our pain is her pain. Our torture is her torture. She took our pain and made it hers so we wouldn't have to suffer it too," writes Lindsay.
Lindsay wrote the the following piece on his blog:

Is Ketchum the What does he think? He says it's good, and from the sound of it, he believes

I have now read a bootleg copy of the 63 page paper. At the same time, I obtained a number of supplementary charts, graphs and whatnot that go along with the paper.

The paper is good. I like it a lot. I thought she did an excellent job on it. It is also very well written. The conclusions are as we discussed earlier on this blog. The MtDNA is human, and the NuDNA is some sort of a subhuman hominid.

Particularly interesting were the extreme measures taken to guard against contamination of the DNA with human DNA by handlers and other animal DNA. There was no DNA from any other known animals present in any of the samples. None of the samples had any human DNA contamination that would explain the results. The samples were very, very pure DNA, purer than one usually gets from humans.

The MtDNA results, while human, were odd, with some SNP’s and other variations not present in any known human samples. The NuDNA samples were very odd, with a combination of human and subhuman DNA of a very novel type. Many NuDNA genes had SNP’s far in excess of the known human standard. Further, the NuDNA codes far away from any known humans on this Earth. In distance from humans, it is further away than Neandertal and even from Denisovans. This implies a split in the NuDNA line of possibly up to 1 million years ago.

The NuDNA results look nothing at all like what one would get from human contamination. The paper goes to great lengths to rule that out and explain the reasoning behind it. Nor are the NuDNA results what one would expect based on contamination with known animals. The paper also explains that very well.

Nor were the samples degraded. Degraded DNA has a particular appearance to it that this DNA lacked. Ketchum utilized a degraded human DNA control to test her sequences against it.

One geneticist said that the results look like what you might get if the sequences failed to amplify well. Ketchum explains in the paper that she had a great deal of difficulty getting the sequences to amplify with many failures to amplify, partial amplifications and whatnot. This is because the primers she was using were designed for humans. She had to utilize next generation, very modern and cutting edge sequencing methods to get this very interesting DNA to amplify at all. Whether the results can be explained by “failure to amplify well” is not something I am capable of commenting on.

Another geneticist said that the odd results including the bizarre mixture of single and double strand DNA (apparently not seen in any other known species) can be explained by artifacts of the testing process. I am not competent to comment on that. Apparently this very odd looking DNA (when observed under electron microscope) is what people were talking about when they said that the DNA was from aliens or angels or was “not of this Earth.” Wally Hersom and David Paulides have been very big on this explanation. Surely, this bizarre DNA is very odd, but Bigfoots are very odd creatures. It’s certainly possible that they might have a novel DNA structure.

Other attacks on the paper is much sillier. Most center around the notion that Bigfoots are apes and therefore they could not breed with humans. But Ketchum’s paper states emphatically that Bigfoots are not apes. They are hominids, probably Homo Heidelbergensis. Obviously another hominid could have bred with humans.

Another compliant is that Melba has not uploaded her sequences to GenBank yet. But apparently she is waiting to do just that.

I do not feel that this paper is a failure at all. What is occurring is what I predicted would occur. The scientific community refuses to accept the existence of this very real species, and they refuse to accept this DNA evidence for that reason. I have been predicating for a long time now that science would not accept the DNA evidence no matter how good it was.

Is it possible that Melba botched the paper and screwed up her proof of Bigfoot? We all know that she had real Bigfoot samples she was dealing with in the study, so all that remained was for her to successfully isolate the DNA and then prove that it was from Bigfoots and not something else. I feel that she did this, but I am not a geneticist. But perhaps she did botch it. I don’t have the expertise to make that determination.

Much has been made of the fact that Melba published in her own journal. However, she did say that it passed peer review in a journal called the Journal of Advanced Multidisciplinary Exploration in Zoology. However, Melba stated that the journal’s attorneys said that if they published the paper, it would destroy the journal’s reputation, so they said they would not publish it. Melba responded by purchasing the journal and renaming it DeNovo Journal.

Melba describes in detail her tribulations at the altar of modern science. Many journals refused to even so much as look at her paper. Others leaked the names of her peer reviewers and did all sorts of unethical things. This is what Melba has been putting up with for 16 months now at the hands of the “scientific community.” They simply flat out refuse to believe that her findings are true, so they won’t even read or pass via review her paper no matter how valid her findings are.

Given these circumstances and the fact that she did finally pass review at an obscure journals, Melba was right and proper to purchase the journal named above when even it refused to publish her findings despite passing them via review. She did the right thing. The findings are correct, Bigfoots exist, and Melba has proven it in my opinion. This information had to get out to the public, and she persevered and did the right thing.

I think the community should all get behind Melba right now, whatever her moral failings. She has been up there on the cross suffering for all of us, for our entire community, for 16 months now, while the legions of science poked her with their lances and jeered at her. She did it for us. She suffered for all of us. All of the pain we all suffer from skeptics – she took all of our pain and bundled it up for us into one giant mass and took it up there with her on the cross of Bigfootery, where she been slowly dying, being tortured to death, for over a year now. Our pain is her pain. Our torture is her torture. She took our pain and made it hers so we wouldn’t have to suffer it too.

This whole episode has been very hard on Melba. You can see it in her face and hear it in her voice. She says if she had to do it over again, she wouldn’t do it. But she did it. She took it on the chin for us all, falling on the grenade so we might live. And how many of us have her back? Basically none of us.

[via Robert Lindsay]