Regular Episode
#084 – NEW MT ON THE BOUNTY
Fair warning: this episode contains full spoilers for all eight episodes of the show, including who won the $100,000 runner-up prize. If you’d prefer to watch first, the episodes were available on Spike TV’s website. Also: the title pun is, by Blake’s own admission, the most astonishing he’s ever managed on MonsterTalk. It holds up.
🎬 Science vs. Spectacle: The Editing Problem
Both guests are candid about the central tension of the show: for every minute of science that made it to air, hours of footage were filmed and cut. The elimination rounds — which viewers saw as terse, dramatic dismissals — were in reality nine-hour sessions during which Todd and Natalia grilled each team on every sample they brought in, sometimes five or six samples per team, with a full series of eight or more questions per group. What aired: roughly seven minutes of dun-dun-dun.
To get the science messaging out ahead of time, Disotell and Reagan produced their own web series, Talking Shit with Dr. Todd and Natalia (linked below), as a preemptive workaround — not knowing how much would survive the edit. As Reagan put it, it was “a fight between science and spectacle,” and American television audiences, predictably, feast on the latter.
🧬 DNA, eDNA, and What the Lab Actually Found
Disotell ran DNA analyses throughout the competition with the help of several technicians, and he’s forthright about what came back: bear, deer, horse (extracted from a leech that had bitten contestant David Lauer in a swamp), and human. No unknown primate. No Bigfoot.
One notable exchange concerned contestant Justin Smeja — a figure already controversial in Bigfoot circles for claiming to have shot and killed a Bigfoot — whose submitted samples reportedly came back labeled “feral human” by whichever lab he’d used. Disotell’s response on air was characteristically direct: there is no such thing as a “feral human” as a genetic category. Feral is a behavioral descriptor, not a biological one. If the sample was human DNA, it was from a human. Which, as Disotell noted with characteristic understatement, would make Smeja’s claim considerably more legally fraught.
On a more optimistic note, the show introduced Disotell to environmental DNA (eDNA) methods — using insects, leeches, and other environmental vectors to survey for organisms without direct observation — which he subsequently incorporated into his NYU research program, including grant applications for next-generation sequencing projects.
🏆 Was the Competition Fair? (Yes, Actually)
A persistent complaint in online communities was that the show was rigged — that producers had pre-selected winners. Both Disotell and Reagan push back firmly. Because the show was legally classified as a game show (contestants competing for prizes), it was subject to the federal regulations that grew out of the 1950s quiz show scandals. A compliance officer was on set from day one, and the judges held formal deliberations — sometimes heated — before every elimination.
The judging criteria included quality of field evidence, teamwork, and most importantly (per Reagan) the contestants’ willingness to revise their hypotheses in light of new information. Teams that dug in on unsupported theories found themselves easier to cut. David Lauer was singled out as a standout for his hypothesis-driven thinking. The winner of the $100,000 prize was the team of Stacey Brown and Dave — confirmed here with a spoiler alert.
🎭 Field Antics: Hoaxing, Sabotage, and Menstrual Wafers
The judges were kept largely separate from the contestants’ overnight hunts — Reagan would accompany teams at the start and occasionally the end of a hunt, while Disotell stayed with the lab. Camera footage reviewed afterward revealed some competitive gamesmanship: footprints stomped out, samples deliberately contaminated (one team was caught on camera pulling a tooth from a deer jaw to pass off as an unknown specimen). Whether that counts as “cheating” or just playing to win is, as Disotell diplomatically noted, a definitional question.
One team attempted to use “chimp and human menstrual wafers” as Bigfoot bait — an approach that traces, apparently, to the folkloric belief that bears are attracted to menstruating women, transposed into Bigfoot culture by unknown mechanisms. The hypothesis, Disotell acknowledged, is not particularly testable. The FLIR footage that generated excitement mid-season was almost certainly another team’s cameraman or sound person stepping away to use the bathroom — the show’s “best footage since Patterson-Gimlin” was a crew member taking a leak in the dark.
📡 The Broader Bigfoot Landscape: Dyer and Ketchum
The show aired during a busy period for Bigfoot claims. Rick Dyer — a serial Bigfoot hoaxer previously responsible for the 2008 Georgia gorilla-suit-in-a-freezer fraud — was simultaneously promoting a body he called “Hank,” which Disotell described as resembling an oversized troll doll. The tell, per Disotell: Dyer kept claiming DNA results were forthcoming but couldn’t name the university doing the analysis because of a non-disclosure agreement. The invocation of an NDA to explain why no verifiable evidence can be produced is, at this point, a reliable signature of a hoax.
The other major concurrent story was the Melba Ketchum Bigfoot DNA paper, which had been the subject of significant skeptical scrutiny at the time of recording.
🌲 What They’d Do Differently
Asked what they’d change as producers, both guests had specific wishes. Reagan wanted a visit to a primate center — such as the Oregon National Primate Research Center — to show contestants how actual apes and primates move, eat, and behave, since most contestants assumed Bigfoot was a descendant of Gigantopithecus. Disotell wanted more screen time for the actual mechanics of PCR (polymerase chain reaction) and the GenBank reference database — partly to head off the recurring online objection that “human DNA” results might mean Bigfoot is human. (If the DNA is human, it is human. This is not a loophole.)
Reagan also wished for entry and exit interviews with each team about their Bigfoot theories — what they thought going in, and whether any of it changed. The elimination format itself, she suggested, may have been unnecessary; the contestants generated plenty of organic drama without being voted off.
📚 Further Reading
– Talking Shit with Dr. Todd and Natalia — web series produced by Disotell and Reagan as a science companion to the show (see Related Links)
🔗 Related Links
– Todd Disotell – Wikipedia
– Environmental DNA (eDNA) – Wikipedia
– Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR) – Wikipedia
– Gigantopithecus – Wikipedia
– Patterson–Gimlin Film – Wikipedia
– Rick Dyer (Bigfoot hoaxer) – Wikipedia
– 1950s Quiz Show Scandals (regulatory context) – Wikipedia
– Dean Cain – Wikipedia
Note: ads inserted into the distributed audio alter the timestamps in unpredictable ways, so timing references in these notes are approximate.
THE 10 MILLION DOLLAR BIGFOOT BOUNTY television contest is over and we’re going to talk to the science advisers for the show to see how they felt about the outcome. Did science win the day? Did editing take away the good take-aways? Will Justin Smeja be getting in trouble for hunting feral humans? Check it out in this episode of MonsterTalk!
Natalia Reagan is an anthropologist, comedian, writer, actress and a co-host of the Ten Million Dollar Bigfoot Bounty. Her academic work has focused on spider monkeys, primate conservation, and evolutionary biology. She combines her wit and creativity with her passion for science advocacy to help make educational videos. As an actress, she’s appeared on shows such as My Name is Earl and Better Off Ted—and as a science consultant on The Today Show and Fox Edge News. This is her first appearance on MonsterTalk.
Dr. Todd Disotell is a professor of anthropology at NYU, and a co-host of the new Spike TV show the Ten Million Dollar Bigfoot Bounty. MonsterTalk listeners will remember Todd from previous visits going back to the very first episode of our show, as well as his appearances on MonsterQuest and Is It Real? He has been a prominent voice for science advocacy and skepticism in cryptozoology.
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