Interview with Dr. Jeff Meldrum About Discovery's Killer Yeti Special

Dr. Jeff Meldrum is featured in the upcoming 2-hour special Russian Yeti: The Killer Lives, premiering June 1st, 2014 at 9pm on the Discovery Channel. Hitfix.com sat down with Dr. Meldrum for the following interview.

So, if we're talking about a yeti doing all this damage, it seems only right to pepper the expert featured in the film, Dr. Jeffrey Meldrum, with our burning yeti questions. Currently a professor at Idaho State University, he’s also a Bigfoot Field Researchers Organization (BFRO) curator. He knows from yetis -- and he also can explain why you haven't seen a fossil of one at your local natural history museum. Here's everything you never knew you wanted to know about these big, furry guys (some believe the yeti and Sasquatch are distinct, like grizzly bears and black bears) that you don't read about in schoolbooks.

It seems like Big Foot hasn't been part of the national conversation lately.

In fact, if anything in the digital age with web pages and blogs and all that, there's an ever increasingly large degree of interest in communication about them. The media turns up their nose at reports unless it's a sensational one or someone who is a character that has certain credibility. There was a family psychologist who claimed to see one, and because of his professional stature it got lots of play. A lot of people get ignored. For the documentary cable channel networks, it's an evergreen topic of interest.

Let's address the points skeptics make about Bigfoot, yetis and the like. Why isn't one of these creatures in a zoo? Why isn't there a fossil of one in a museum? And why are the photos and video we see presented as "proof" so blurry?

Definitely Lots of rare and endangered animals are not in zoos, like the mountain gorillas. That doesn't raise a question mark. We also have almost zero remains of animals that inhabit wet forest, so fossilization is very rare. Occupying a wet coniferous forest produces acidic conditions in the soil, so that's likewise a very rare place to produce a fossil. The giant ape is a creature we know that existed in eastern Asia for well over a million years, but we have a very few fossils. The ones we do have exist because porcupines dragged the bones into caves, where they were preserved. If it hadn't been for the porcupines, we wouldn't know the giant ape ever existed.

And why are pictures blurry? When people discuss that, they're usually referring to the Patterson-Gimlin film, and what they see is a licensed copy of a copy of a VHS that gets released by the owners, but I've worked with some film analysts and [the original] is remarkably clear. And as to photos, when you're dealing with smart phones and digital cameras, most encounters are very fleeting. One time I was driving on the freeway with my brother, and I had a camera sitting on the seat next to me. I saw a deer crossing the freeway and thought it would be a good photo to take, but by the time I had a camera and the lens cap off all I caught was the tail. If I see an 8-foot hairy primate, I might not have been so quick to grab my camera [due to the shock]. There was a Facebook site called Facebook Find Bigfoot, and it had all these little examples of the imagery. They established a set of criteria, different aspects, different criteria, and they evaluated each of these. It was kind of fascinating.

For the rest of the interview, click here.