The meme with the really big feet

Man, there's a lot to be learned from watching people's responses to the recent bigfoot claim. Most news agencies are bending over backwards to insult and discredit these guys.

• AOL
• BBC
• AJC
• Yahoo
• some chinese site
• and another dozen articles I've read about it this weekend,
• the only article that doesn't insult the two guys who claim to have found it.
  

I have yet to see anything that convinces me they've got an actual sasquatch corpse. I'm pretty skeptical, mostly because they didn't have the body on-hand at the press conference. If they really had a bigfoot corpse, the smart move would have been to let the press see it. Then the press would have had to admit that what you hand isn't just a guy in a furry suit.

By leaving the press out, you piss them off. Rather than being objective (perhaps with a side of skeptical), the news articles above are full of ad hominem attacks and mis-statements.

fueled by a photograph of a hairy heap, bearing a close resemblance to a shaggy full-body gorilla costume, stuffed into a container resembling a refrigerator.

That's total BS. Look at what they claim to have in a fridge. It may well be a bigfoot costume, but it's not a gorilla costume. Here's a spread of gorilla costumes from a variety of sources. Notice how gorilla costumes, like gorillas, tend to have black fur, and a dark grey hairless face. That's so they look kinda like a gorilla. This thing has brown fur, with short brown facial fur and tan lips. It could still be a costume, but it's no gorilla costume. Yet many articles regurgitate the gorilla costume line, which is obviously not true.

Whitton, who also goes by the name Gary Parker,

A lot of the articles mention that he goes by this other name - but no one clarifies why. It makes him sound like a shady character, since he uses an alias. Of course, he's actually a police officer, and is currently off-duty while recovering from a gunshot wound gained while making a robbery arrest. Is Gary Parker a name he uses while undercover? Or is he a slimy guy with lots of aliases? None of the articles seem to think it's worth explaining, but it's potentially quite relevant, as it speaks to the character of the 'witness'.

Biscardi, Whitton and Dyer presented what they called evidence supporting the Bigfoot theory. It was an e-mail from a University of Minnesota scientist, but all it said was that of the three DNA samples sent to him, one was human, one was likely a possum and the third could not be tested because of technical problems.

Yet, multiple news reports claim it "failed the DNA test". That the results were two different species for two tests and bulloxed the third doesn't really prove anything either way. At most all it proves is the unskilled incompetence of whoever gathered and prepared the samples. That's not surprising, since DNA tests (at least paternity tests, according to a google search I did) are often done by means of mail-in samples. Unless your article reveals how the samples were gathered and delivered, you shouldn't be drawing conclusions like that.

Chimps and humans have 98% identical DNA. The Rhesus Macaque has DNA 93.5% like humans. [Source] So it's not necessarily simple to tell a human sample from a close-to-human sample. When a scientist says human, "probably opossum" and inconclusive, how is your average journalist qualified to concludes that means the same thing as "not bigfoot". If bigfoot exists, no one knows what it's DNA is going to be like. Does anyone have the experience, data, and scientific background to say for certain whether or not a particular DNA sequence belongs to humans or bigfoot? While there's folks in the scientific community with the training to say that a sample is not human DNA, those people are probably not working as reporters.

So, here's my open letter to those guys in Georgia who claim to have Bigfoot in their freezer:

If you're legit, quit wasting money on DNA tests. DNA tests will never prove it's a sasquatch - at best they'll prove it isn't human. Do an autopsy, and invite multiple news services to set up cameras in the room while it's done. Let them each provide their own biologist, mortician or taxidermist to look at the body before, during and afterwards, too. You can choose who's performing or leading the autopsy, but let the news sources have their own specialists on hand to confirm there's no hanky-panky on your part. An autopsy should show it isn't a halloween costume full of ground sausage, or a mask stapled on to a bear carcass, or any of the other crazy things you've been accused of by the media this weekend.

If, on the other hand, your bigfoot corpse is just a hoax, then shut the heck up. You're not gonna get rich on this (those DNA tests ain't cheap) and you're just making it harder for other folks to be taken seriously when they find something genuine, like those guys that found the first Coelacanth. For the sake of science, quit being an ass.