MNN - Mother Nature Network

Bigfoot is real and we have the DNA evidence to prove it, says a group of scientists who purchased a scientific journal to publish their results after other journals rejected their paper.

 

According to the only paper published in the first issue of DeNovo Scientific Journal, a collection of purported Sasquatch tissue samples reveals that Bigfoot is not a new species but a hybrid of human females and an as-yet-unidentified primate species that mated 13,000 years ago.

 

The abstract to the paper says the team of forensic scientists examined 111 blood, tissue, hair and "other" samples collected in 14 U.S. states and two Canadian provinces and extracted DNA and mitochondrial DNA (mDNA). The 11 researchers titled their paper "Novel North American Hominins, Next Generation Sequencing of Three Whole Genomes and Associated Studies."

 

The study's lead author, Texas-based veterinarian and geneticist Melba Ketchum, first reported her team's discovery last November, when she said "Sasquatch nuclear DNA is incredibly novel and not at all what we had expected. While it has human nuclear DNA within its genome, there are also distinctly non-human, non-archaic hominin, and non-ape sequences. We describe it as a mosaic of human and novel non-human sequence. Further study is needed and is ongoing to better characterize and understand Sasquatch nuclear DNA." At the time the study had not been published in a peer-reviewed scientific journal, so not too many people took it seriously.

 

In a commentary published Feb. 13 on her Sasquatch Genome Project website, Ketchum wrote that "it has been a long and tedious battle to prove that Sasquatch exists." She accuses the "mainstream" scientific community of "the worst scientific bias in the peer review process in recent history," equating her team's treatment with that of famed physicist Galileo Galilei, who was imprisoned for saying the sun did not revolve around the Earth. "We did finally pass peer review with a relatively new journal," Ketchum wrote. But in her commentary, Ketchum points out that she acquired a journal and renamed it. Ketchum then links to a site that says it is ethical for journal authors to serve as their own editors.

 

DeNovo proclaims itself to be a peer-reviewed journal, but in her commentary, Ketchum says she is using peer reviews from a previous journal that rejected the manuscript. In another odd twist that differentiates DeNovo from other scientific journals, it claims to be open access — which normally means that a publication's papers are available to the public for free — yet it charges $30 to read the Sasquatch paper.

 

The news site Ars Technica paid the $30 fee for a copy of the paper and called it "a mess." Meanwhile, famed Bigfoot researcher Loren Coleman wondered about the validity of the new journal on his blog CryptoZooNews, asking "Is this vanity publishing? Is this scientific suicide?"

 

Bigfoot himself could not be reached for comment.