UFO Research Center of Pennsylvania

ANALYSIS OF DR. M. KETCHUMS BIGFOOT DNA TESTING

David Winter, a PhD in evolutionary biology in New Zealand. He says the first thing you do is “BLAST” the sequences. You may have heard Melba Ketchum mention, “blasting” in some of her interviews. That means to take sequences and compare them to existing mapped sequences in a huge genetic database. GenBank® is where all DNA sequences should go to be shared with the scientific community. As was noted by Ketchum in the paper she says that the results didn’t go there because of “lack of taxon” which made little sense to the scientists.

The sequence did not match a hominid sequence but part of it did match very well with human chromosome 11. 60% didn’t match with anything on Earth and the rest of it matched with various animals such as panda, dog and bear, etc. These bits that matched may be a sign of a mixed sample. So, as Winter notes, he’s not sure if the researchers are inept or deliberate in their interpretation but some of the DNA is perfectly matched to humans and the rest is “crap”. Some of the sequences, he said, were far too short to be the result of hybridization, making Ketchums claim of hybridization from 15,000 years ago not plausible. Others have also questioned the hybridization idea. Contamination remains the obvious question. It’s not that the collector contaminated the samples necessarily but that the sample itself was a mix. So, no matter how careful they were in the lab to prevent investigator contamination (as Ketchum insists), the damage was already done if it was junk to begin with.
Conclusion? Bad. I still suspect that other analyses will come forward to perhaps explain what might have happened with these samples. But, bottom line is, it is NOT being accepted as evidence of Sasquatch.