Ketchum and Company, At It Again

Last week a news item made the rounds on the Internet regarding the Paracas skulls, a collection of unusually elongated skulls discovered in Peru in 1928. The skulls are something of a scientific curiosity due to both their shape and size. In some ancient cultures elongated skulls were produced by binding the head from early childhood, but the Paracas skulls are larger in volume and weight than normal human skulls and likely could not have been produced by binding alone. One possibility is binding combined with a condition such as hydrocephalus, which is known to enlarge the skull if untreated.

Obviously, obtaining the genetic code from these skulls would provide some insight into whether or not the size of the skulls might be due to some underlying medical condition. Unfortunately, the first group to look into DNA from the skulls includes Dr. Melba Ketchum, one of the founders of the De Novo Scientific Journal, a sham publication apparently created to showcase her work on sequencing Bigfoot DNA. You know, the same DNA that an independent, reputable geneticist identifed as possum. Now DeNovo has never published another article, so I imagine that a paper on the Paracas skulls would be welcome.

What the group apparently discovered is that the Paracas skulls contain mitochondrial DNA that identify them as an entirely new sort of human, distinct from modern humans, Neanderthals, and the recently identified Denisovans. The problem is that team involved has so many credibility issues it's hard to accept those findings. While Ketchum is not the only geneticist involved, it's a mystery to me why anyone would work with her at all. Conflating Bigfoot and possum is a pretty serious error - unless, I suppose, the sasquatch turns out to be a half-ape, half-possum horror straight out of a B-movie.

The Real Bigfoot?

Back in February I covered the story of the DeNovo Scientific Journal, a publication apparently created for the sole purpose of publishing a research paper by geneticist Melba Ketchum regarding the supposed sequencing of bigfoot DNA. As I noted at the time, the trouble with this is that publishing your own paper in your own scientific journal bypasses the process of peer review and as such cannot meaningfully be called scientific. The whole point of peer review is to allow other researchers to check your findings, to rule out any possibility of experimental error that might happen in any individual study.

Yesterday science blogger Eric Berger published his account of having Ketchum's "bigfoot DNA" analyzed by another geneticist - that is, performing the sort of peer review that would be necessary to validate that bigfoot indeed represents an unknown species.

I am first and foremost a journalist, and I figured if there was even a 1 percent chance that the Bigfoot evidence was real, it was worth my time to check the story out.

So I agreed to be an intermediary between Ketchum and a highly reputable geneticist in Texas, whom I trusted and knew personally. I also knew that this geneticist was first and foremost a scientist, and if there was even a 1 percent chance the Bigfoot evidence was real, he’d want check out the story. I asked, and he was willing to approach the evidence with an open mind.

(Why am I maintaining my source’s anonymity? Because some of his peers would question his engagement on such a topic, believing it unworthy of valuable research time. But make no mistake, he is a top-notch scientist at the top of his field.)

Doing Peer Review Wrong

In science the concept of peer review is essential to establishing the validity of any working hypothesis. For a scientific discovery to be accepted, the data that supports it must be subjected to rigorous and thorough criticism by others working in the same field. Once a consensus is reached regarding the discovery, it will either be added to the existing canon of scientific fact or discarded as an anomalous finding. At least, that's the ideal of how it's supposed to work.

Back in November, I reported that a group of geneticists claimed to have sequenced Bigfoot DNA and concluded that the fortean primate was an ape/human hybrid. The researchers claimed that they would soon subject their findings to peer review, but as it turns out rather than following accepted scientific procedures and publishing the findings in a standard journal, the researchers started their own. This is pretty close to the opposite of actual peer review, since it's not like there aren't other journals out there publishing articles on biology and genetics. See, when you review your own findings, that's pretty much the definition of doing peer review wrong. And clicking through the journal's website reveals other obvious problems.

Please note the helpfully labeled slideshow cycling through on the front page — pollen; ladybug; eagle; h2o — as if to say: "Don't worry, this place is legit. Look, stock photos. Also this is a ladybug because you probably didn't know that."

Bigfoot DNA Sequenced?

For years, bigfoot hunters have been gathering samples of biological material that they believe come from the elusive creature. Ever since the advent of DNA testing technology, cryptozoologists have also been claiming that they're about to sequence DNA from the samples and prove that the Sasquatch is a real animal - and then are never heard from in the media again. Finally, Texas veterinarian Melba Ketchum claims to have done it, and that her results prove the Sasquatch is an ape/human hybrid.

Ketchum's team consists of experts in genetics, forensics, imaging and pathology. The researcher said she believes that over the past five years, the team has successfully found three Sasquatch nuclear genomes -- an organism's hereditary code -- leading them to suggest that the animal is real and a human hybrid.

Ketchum's study showed that part of the DNA her team sequenced revealed an unknown primate species, she said, which suggests that Bigfoot is a real creature that resulted from this primate "crossing with female Homo sapiens."

"They're not any of the large apes -- they branch off as a separate lineage," Ketchum said. "My personal theory is that it probably branched off and evolved in parallel with the rest of the primate lineage."