Regular Episode
#077 – YOU WON’T BELIEVE WHAT THESE SKEPTICS HAVE TO SAY ABOUT BIGFOOT
The episode title, Blake confesses mid-conversation, is a deliberate joke at the expense of the clickbait ecosystem that keeps Bigfoot “news” alive: Two Skeptics Discuss Bigfoot and You Won’t Believe What Happens Next. If you’ve made it this far, you were in on it from the start.
🔫 The Sierra Kills: A Story That Keeps Changing
Blake and Sharon open on the Sierra Kills case — the claim by hunter Justin Smeja that he shot and killed two Bigfoot creatures in the Sierra Nevada mountains, then left the bodies behind. The story, already circulating on Bigfoot forums, had appeared in a sidebar Sharon wrote alongside her coverage of the Ketchum DNA study. Since then it has metastasized: depending on which interview or TV appearance you caught, Justin either shot the animals, strangled one, or cradled a dying juvenile face-to-face before it expired in his arms.
On 10 Million Dollar Bigfoot Bounty (Spike TV), Smeja claimed the DNA results from his samples came back as “feral human and bear” — prompting co-host Todd Disotell‘s immediate on-camera rebuttal: there is no DNA marker for “feral human,” and if you killed one, you’ve committed murder.
The British ITV three-part documentary Bigfoot Files, hosted by geneticist Dr. Bryan Sykes, sent cameras to meet Smeja and actually tested his blood-stained boot. Result: no blood. The sample that did exist came back as bear. Sharon notes the story’s narrative arc — from confused hunter to grieving surrogate parent to reality-TV contestant — and observes that inconsistent stories of this type tend not to recant; they accrete detail. Blake and Sharon also dismiss the polygraph Smeja reportedly passed: polygraphs are not admissible in court and measure physiological arousal, not deception.
🧬 The Ketchum DNA Study and the Erickson Project
Sharon recaps the trajectory of Melba Ketchum‘s much-hyped Bigfoot DNA study, which promised peer-reviewed proof of a novel hominid and delivered, in Sharon’s words, “a circus.” The study was self-published in a journal Ketchum reportedly purchased for the purpose, and independent geneticists found the results methodologically incoherent.
Tied to Ketchum’s work was the Erickson Project, led by Adrian Erickson and running since at least 2005. Their promised high-definition photographic and video evidence — including an infrared clip of a figure walking away — struck both hosts as obviously fake. The stiff, mask-like face in the stills drew instant comparisons to a Chewbacca costume, a comparison Erickson’s supporters disputed but could not convincingly rebut. Sharon notes that Erickson’s website blamed science for “refusing to look at the evidence” — an argument she finds has, as Blake puts it, “no big feet to stand on.”
Jeff Meldrum — a legitimate anatomist at Idaho State University who believes Bigfoot is a real animal — examined at least one of the Sierra Kills samples and reportedly found it inconsistent with a primate. Sharon draws a distinction between Meldrum’s scientific caution and the rumor mill represented by blogger Robert Lindsay, whom she characterizes as “the Daily Mail of Bigfootery.”
🧊 Rick Dyer and the Body in the Freezer (Again)
The conversation turns to Rick Dyer and his partner Matt Whitton, who in August 2008 claimed to have a Bigfoot corpse stored in a freezer in Georgia. The press conference — held in California with promoter Tom Biscardi — ended with the “body” revealed as a rubber gorilla suit stuffed with animal entrails. Blake recalls the moment friends called to say Bigfoot had finally been found, and the conversation about the difference between “they found Bigfoot” and “someone claims they found Bigfoot.”
Rather than retiring in disgrace, Dyer resurfaced in 2013 with a new body — nicknamed Hank — allegedly shot near San Antonio after Dyer baited it with pork ribs. He dragged the claim through a year’s worth of YouTube monologues, a fake “I quit” announcement, a Las Vegas exhibition, and a documentary called Shooting Bigfoot (which Sharon and Blake decline to link or recommend). The DNA results Dyer cited were described as “human-like.” Blake compares Dyer’s persistence to televangelist Peter Popoff — someone apparently comfortable saying things they know to be false because an audience is willing to pay to hear them.
🧪 Bryan Sykes, Zana, and What DNA Actually Revealed
The episode’s most substantive segment covers Dr. Bryan Sykes‘s Oxford-Lausanne Collateral Hominid Project, documented in the ITV series Bigfoot Files. Sykes tested hair and tissue samples submitted by Bigfoot and Almasty researchers worldwide. For North American samples, results came back as bear, deer, cow, and canid — mundane and disappointing for the submitters, who were nonetheless largely undeterred.
The most remarkable result involved the Russian Almasty tradition and a legendary nineteenth-century figure known as Zana — described in folklore as a wild woman kept by a village in the western Caucasus, who bore children by local men. One of her sons, Khwit, was buried locally, and Russian researcher Igor Burtsev had exhumed the skull. Sykes tested both the skull and living descendants. The result: Zana was of sub-Saharan African descent — not a relict hominid, not a Neanderthal, but a human being whose actual origins had been mythologized beyond recognition over roughly a century and a half of retelling.
Sharon and Blake reflect on how similar this folkloric drift is to the Roswell incident — a mundane origin story amplified into elaborate mythology through decades of feedback loops. In Zana’s case, the human story beneath the legend is genuinely dark: a woman of African descent, visibly different, almost certainly enslaved or otherwise exploited, whose suffering was reframed as something inhuman. Sharon notes that Burtsev appeared to receive the finding with disappointment rather than acceptance — a pattern she describes as “supernatural creep,” where researchers unable to fit the evidence into a biological framework drift toward paranormal explanations rather than revising their beliefs.
📺 Media Coverage: Bigfoot as Clickbait
Blake articulates a hypothesis he and Sharon and Daniel Loxton had discussed offline: mainstream media outlets covering Bigfoot stories have no genuine interest in the subject. Bigfoot coverage exists because the word alone generates clicks — the same logic as “kid drives car” or “motorcycle hits cotton candy factory.” Reporters rarely Google whether a claimant is a known hoaxer (Dyer’s 2008 fraud was publicly documented), and when they do, they treat it as charming color rather than disqualifying context.
Sharon adds that she covers Bigfoot stories on Doubtful News reluctantly, and only to insert skeptical framing into Google results before credulous coverage dominates. Both hosts warn against the more hostile corners of the Bigfoot internet — forums and blogs where skeptics, women, and dissenting voices face coordinated harassment — and decline to link to them.
🌲 Is There Anything Promising?
Despite the litany of failures, both hosts find a measured note of optimism. The Ketchum affair, whatever its scientific failings, educated a portion of the Bigfoot community about what DNA testing can and cannot do, and raised the evidentiary bar. Sharon notes that some groups have genuinely internalized that blurry photos (“blobsquatches”), unverified eyewitness reports, and dubious footprint casts are not going to establish the existence of a new species — and have begun prioritizing clean biological sample collection.
Blake appreciates that 10 Million Dollar Bigfoot Bounty, for all its reality-TV absurdity, at least modeled proper evidence-collection protocols and called contestants on biologically incoherent claims (a creature that is simultaneously a biped and a quadruped, subsisting on both berries and deer). And both agree: getting out in the woods and looking is a perfectly fine thing to do. You just shouldn’t expect to find Bigfoot.
📚 Further Reading
– 📚 Abominable Science! 💵 by Daniel Loxton and Donald R. Prothero
– 📚 Sasquatch: Legend Meets Science 💵 by Jeff Meldrum
– 📚 The Nature of the Beast 💵 by Bryan Sykes
– 📚 Borderlands 💵 by Mike Dash
🔗 Related Links
– Bigfoot — Wikipedia
– Almasty (Russian wild man tradition) — Wikipedia
– Zana — Wikipedia
– Bryan Sykes — Wikipedia
– Melba Ketchum — Wikipedia
– Polygraph validity — Wikipedia
– Patterson–Gimlin film — Wikipedia
– Doubtful News — Sharon Hill’s skeptical news site
Note: ads inserted into the distributed audio alter the timestamps in unpredictable ways, so timing references in these notes are approximate.
SHARON HILL RETURNS to discuss the state of Bigfoot research including the various claims about bigfoot bodies, DNA, videos and film. Is the discovery of Bigfoot imminent? Is the field becoming more scientific?
Guest Sharon Hill, a longtime skeptical activist, can be found on twitter by her handle @idoubtit.
Music
- Monstertalk Theme: Monster by Peach Stealing Monkeys
MTArchivist
0