CLASSICS (Bonus Episode): Dr. Haskell Hart!

Speaker 1 (00:02):
Big Food and Beyond.

Speaker 2 (00:06):
With Cliff and Bobo. These guys are your favorites, so
like to subscribe and rain it.

Speaker 3 (00:13):
Live star S and Me.

Speaker 1 (00:18):
Greatest Gone Yesterday and listening watching Lin always keep its watching.

Speaker 4 (00:26):
And now you're hosts Cliff Barrickman and James Bobo Fay.

Speaker 2 (00:31):
Well, hello everybody, this is Cliff, And of course you're
listening to Bigfoot and Beyond with Cliff and usually Bobo.
Today is another one of the circumstances. Bobo is unavailable
for us, so we're just gonna move ahead without him.
And I'm certain at some point you'll get Bobo without me,
So all the Bobo fans keep listening. So I think
you're gonna enjoy today's episode. Today, I am thrilled to

(00:54):
have a doctor Haskell Heart on the program here. He
of course is the author of the Sasquatch Genome Project,
a failed DNA study kindly kind of a controversial book
based on a controversial study by doctor melbur Ketcham of course,
so I wanted to get in deep with that, and
of course any chance we have to talk to somebody
with a legitimate PhD, we want to jump on more.

(01:16):
Science needs to be brought into this field. There's nothing
wrong with amateurs doing the work, but when scientists get involved,
it just brings our subject, the Bigfoot subject, to a
brand new level. So with that, doctor Hart, welcome to
Bigfoot and Beyond with Cliff and usually Bobo. Thanks for
taking some time for us today.

Speaker 3 (01:34):
Well, it's a pleasure to be here, Cliff, and.

Speaker 1 (01:39):
I'm really honored to be on your program.

Speaker 3 (01:42):
Thanks for having me.

Speaker 2 (01:43):
Well, you know, I'm thrilled to have you on. When
I heard about this book, I bought it. I've read it,
and I'll be honest with you, a lot of it
went over my head because I don't have the chemistry background.
I took a year of chemistry in college, well in
high school too, but in college. But that's all I have.
So I but I you know, one of my superpowers
I've been told is that I can take very complex
information and kind of distill it for normal people, you know,

(02:07):
people without advanced degrees, for example, because I was a
teacher for a long time. So I'm hoping to do
a little bit of that today with some of your work.
But before we get into the meat of it, doctor,
can you tell us a little bit about your background
and what makes you qualified as a scientist specifically to
look into something like this.

Speaker 3 (02:26):
Well, I have a PhD in chemistry.

Speaker 2 (02:30):
Any particular kind of chemistry, like organic chemistry or.

Speaker 1 (02:33):
What Actually it was physical chemistry, Okay, but I did
research that was also in organic chemistry, and I talked
for ten and a half years at the University of
North Carolina at Wilmington and General Chemistry, Physical chemistry, a
couple of other seminars. Then I took a position with

(02:57):
Shelle in Houston and Research as analytical chemist and spent
over twenty years solving chemical problems for shell So I
have a good background and analytical techniques, of which really

(03:17):
the biochemistry in this controversial papers based on analytical chemistry. Really,
I'm not a biochemist, but I believe that I'm fully
capable of learning what I need to learn in that
area based on my background. Quite frankly, I had not
followed the Bigfoot phenomenon very closely.

Speaker 3 (03:42):
I kind of heard headlines from time to time.

Speaker 1 (03:45):
Until the catch and paper came out, and that's how
I got enervated and involved.

Speaker 2 (03:53):
Now, from reading your book, you write about your sasquatch
siting that you actually had when did that occur? In
can you tell us little bit about that? Please?

Speaker 3 (04:01):
Yes, that occurred much more recently. Of course.

Speaker 1 (04:06):
Her paper came out in twenty thirteen, and my sighting
was in two thousand and eighteen. And well, I was
in southeast Oklahoma in the Wachitaw National Forest and walking
down a trail, and all of a sudden, out of

(04:29):
my peripheral vision, I saw this motion and I saw
I saw the animal in clear sunlight, which is unusual,
especially in that area, since there's a lot of high
trees and it's very dense. There's very few sunny areas,
so this was fortunate. It had a nice reddish brown

(04:51):
color to it, as a lot of people have previously reported,
contrasted against a green lit background, which couldn't ask for
better contrast.

Speaker 3 (05:03):
This is not dark gray on light gray or whatever
most people see.

Speaker 1 (05:09):
And I only saw it for I'd have to estimate
between two and three seconds.

Speaker 3 (05:18):
As it darted back into the woods.

Speaker 1 (05:21):
I tried to see it again by walking around, and
I did not, so later some colleagues and I measured
the distance and it was thirty yards.

Speaker 2 (05:35):
Oh that's nice and clothes great, which is close.

Speaker 1 (05:38):
I thought it was fifty yards, but I'm not good
at estimating, and we did this twice. One guy stepped
it off and also he said, point to a tree
that's about the same distance, and I did.

Speaker 3 (05:53):
This was back at the camp, and.

Speaker 1 (05:55):
He measured it and it was exactly thirty yards too,
So I'm pretty confident that's about, you know, plus or
minus a little air there, that's how far it was.

Speaker 3 (06:05):
And that's also very fortunate.

Speaker 1 (06:09):
And there were no obstructions in front of me that
would have obscured the animal. So I'm very confident that
that's what I saw.

Speaker 3 (06:20):
It was large.

Speaker 1 (06:21):
We had a another guy stood out there. He's over
six feet tall, and it was a lot taller than
him and a lot broader too, So.

Speaker 3 (06:33):
And the vertical posture, the.

Speaker 1 (06:37):
Aspect ratio vertical rather than horizontal, you know, makes it
clear it was not a bear or.

Speaker 3 (06:46):
Something like that. And it walked.

Speaker 1 (06:48):
Very fast, and I which a bear does not on
two feet if it ever cuts on two feet, and so.

Speaker 3 (06:57):
And I heard a snap a twig or a branch
that it.

Speaker 1 (07:03):
Stepped on, coming right from the same place, so you know,
that's another sensory confirmation.

Speaker 3 (07:12):
So that's the long and the short of it.

Speaker 2 (07:15):
Were you able to locate any footprints or markings in
the ground of any sort.

Speaker 1 (07:20):
The ground was disturbed, but there were no obvious footprints
that we could detect.

Speaker 2 (07:26):
I see. Okay, One last question about your signing the well,
maybe a couple more thinking about it, But did you
get to see the entire you know, head to head
to toe body as it ran away or walked quickly
away into the brush again or no.

Speaker 1 (07:41):
I saw it from the top of the head to
I would say around the knees. There was some lower
lying brush that obscured the feet.

Speaker 2 (07:54):
Did it walk like a human? I know, superficially it
walked like a human, But did you notice any distinctions
like well, that was seemed very unhuman like.

Speaker 1 (08:05):
Well, the arms were very long, and it was swinging
them as in a fast gate. I did see the hair.
There was some sort of clumped up hair that stood
out and glistened in the sunlight.

Speaker 3 (08:24):
I didn't get a good look at the head.

Speaker 1 (08:26):
It was going away at forty five degrees, so I
saw more of the back of the head, and I
didn't see the face, so I can't comment on that
the arms were long.

Speaker 3 (08:39):
Is about the only other thing I could.

Speaker 2 (08:42):
Add, now, were you looking for sasquatches when the sighting occurred,
or is this an accidental thing you were hunting or something?

Speaker 3 (08:48):
In a general way, I was.

Speaker 1 (08:51):
I went to this area because it's known to have sasquatch.

Speaker 3 (08:57):
Other people have seen.

Speaker 1 (08:58):
Them and observed their doings, and so yes, on this
particular trip, I you know, it was sort of like
I'm always alert.

Speaker 3 (09:11):
I'm a pretty keen observer of nature, but.

Speaker 1 (09:14):
I wasn't just you know, keyed in ninety nine percent
to finding a sasquatch.

Speaker 3 (09:21):
So it came as a little bit of a surprise.

Speaker 2 (09:25):
Yeah, I think, no matter how well you think you
prepare yourself for seeing such a thing, if you're lucky
enough to actually have it happen, there's no way you
can prepare yourself. It's like, well, that was silly that
I even thought I could figure out whether.

Speaker 1 (09:37):
I mean, I had a camera but no time to
get it out in a couple of seconds like that.
You know, if I had been a little bit more
on the ball, I might have had it ready in
my hands. But then you walk around like that and
you're so focused on your camera you don't see other things.

(09:57):
So I the way it was no picture.

Speaker 2 (10:02):
Oh yeah, And two or three seconds really isn't long
enough to get dracked together, to know.

Speaker 1 (10:06):
Your camera can barely focus in that amount of time.
You know.

Speaker 2 (10:11):
Yeah, when I'm driving the roads, and when I when
I go out bigfooting or whatever, and I'm alone, I'm
driving the roads, and I keep a video camera right
next to me, right next to me on the on
the center console, and I tell myself, I'm going to
video any animal I see, an owl, a deer, whatever,
And through it throughout the years, I've failed ninety five
percent of the time because the counters are so brief,

(10:33):
and you have to fumble for the camera and you know,
you have to turn the camera on and has a
cycle through it of the software and all that kind
of stuff. It's just ridiculous to think that we should
have all these pictures of these things when you kind
of had an average sighting in a way, it lasted
two or three seconds, the thing walked away, you never
saw it again. That's kind of the story for eighty
percent of all sightings, it seems.

Speaker 1 (10:52):
I'm sorry to say you that's true. Yes, you're very
right about that. And one other approach one could have
is to use one of these go pros, or you know,
a camera that's on constantly on your head, directed in
the direction that you're looking. Had I done that, I

(11:14):
might have got some sort of video. I don't know
how good it would be, but that's another approach.

Speaker 3 (11:19):
And then you do that and for days and days
and still come up with nothing.

Speaker 2 (11:26):
Usually that's the story, isn't it. I'm a huge advocate,
and I think I harp on it quite often on
the program here that I think every car driving in
the woods should be equipped with a dash cam, since
you know, almost half of sightings happened from cars on
the side of the roads. If you know, if all
these cars had dash camps, like they do in a
lot of European and Asian countries, we would have I

(11:49):
think a fair body of footage of sasquatches, and the
Georgia dash camp video would be proof in the pudding
on that one. But yeah, I personally use a Garment
dash camp. I don't I'm not sponsored by Garment or anything,
you know, but that's the one I happen to have.
It's fantastic. But if you want to spend less money,
our listeners out there get an eighty dollars dash cam,
you know every they're so cheap nowties I bet, I

(12:10):
bet you can get them for cheaper than eighty dollars,
and you can drive roads at night and suddenly you're
big footing and have a better chance of getting footage
than almost anybody else.

Speaker 1 (12:18):
Well, that's a great tip I'm going to pick up
on myself. I hadn't thought about that much. Now, do
you keep them on constantly or do you switch them
on when you need them?

Speaker 2 (12:30):
The way that most dash cams work nowadays is that
they're constantly recording, and so if you you know, they're
obviously be for accidents and things like that, you know,
insurance purposes, But that's secondary to me. Bigfoot's number one
on my list, especially considering where I live. So if
you're driving down the road and say a sasquatch or
a bear or anything else you want to capture runs
out in front of the car, the camera is already recording,

(12:54):
and so most of them you just push a button
on the camera itself, and what it does it saves
the footage fifteen or twenty seconds, sometimes thirty seconds before
and after you push the button, And that way you
don't have to go screen through, you know, twenty hours
of you driving, you know, in the freeway right there.

(13:15):
It goes in a special file and those files are
about a minute long or forty seconds long, and they
are saved in a separate spot, so you can go
back and just go into that one folder and look
at the things that you actually wanted to save.

Speaker 1 (13:26):
Well, that sounds like a bargain for eighty two one
hundred dollars.

Speaker 2 (13:30):
Yeah, yeah, And there's all sorts of cheap ones that
are available out there, you know, Amazon or your local
electronics store. And again, I think statistically speaking, it is
one of the most effective ways one can go bigfooting.

Speaker 3 (13:42):
That days though, sounds great, I'm going to do it.

Speaker 2 (13:45):
Let's get into the Ketchum study. And you know, and
for listeners are out there who are preparing us to
gore their sacred cow, so to speak. We're not going
to slam Melbour or anything like that. We're going to
talk about the science here, just the science, because what
doctor haskell Hart has done here is essentially one of
the steps of the scientific process of peer review. Science

(14:07):
is not a body of knowledge that these people in
ivory towers protect at all costs because that's their worldview.
Science generally speaking, doesn't squash unpopular opinions if it stands
up to peer review. It generally speaking, if science is
a process of getting to the truth by taking your data,

(14:28):
taking the things that you have here, and forming a model.
In this case the DNA stuff aside for sasquatches, we
have this stuff. People say they see these things, that
giant ape like things in the woods. They are these footprints.
Native people tell stories about these sort of things. There
is this evidence here, and so we're going to come
up with a hypothesis, which of course is like a theory,

(14:51):
but not as strong, shall we say, And hopefully we
can go gather more evidence and if the evidence supports
our hypothesis andhypothesis, and in this case, our hypothesis is
that there's a wild animal responsible for this stuff, some
sort of primate almost certainly right, And so we can
go gather evidence that might support or not support the

(15:13):
presence of some sort of primate in the woods. And
if it supports it, great, We're going to continue trying
to collect more evidence that supports our hypothesis, our guess.
But if we run across evidence that does not support
our hypothesis, then we need to modify our model, modify
our hypothesis, and then try to go collect more. And really,

(15:34):
one of the things that about science, and I don't
think people appreciate, is that scientists are not trying to
prove themselves right most of the time. They're literally trying
to prove themselves wrong most of the time. And if
they can prove themselves wrong, then they have to modify
their hypothesis. But if they cannot prove themselves wrong, well
maybe they're correct, but they continue trying to prove themselves wrong.

(15:57):
So I want to get that straight out there, because
in society today there is this anti science bias, the
distrusting of scientists and specialists or whatever, because our phone
tells us that kind of thing, and I want to
get that out that science in this case, in most cases,
is not a body of knowledge that scientists are protecting
because that's their worldview. It is actually a process of

(16:19):
finding out what the truth is. And doctor Haskell Hart
here has done some of that peer review work, and
that's what we're going to talk about today. So we're
talking about the scientific process. We're not attacking individuals, So
everybody can relax Okay, so thanks for letting me rant
for a moment about that. I just want to set
the record straight, doctor Heart. But how did you first

(16:40):
hear about the sasquatch genome project.

Speaker 1 (16:43):
Well, I think, like a lot of people, I heard
about it on the news TV news, because it was
widely reported there by a number of TV networks, and
so that that was my introduction.

Speaker 3 (17:02):
And I thought, well, this is great, you know, because
I knew.

Speaker 1 (17:06):
Enough about the subject that it was controversial, and that
other than the Patterson Gimlin film there was and some footprints,
there was little to go on. So I thought, great,
you know DNA, that's the answer here.

Speaker 3 (17:21):
This will.

Speaker 1 (17:23):
Solve the problem of what kind of an animal this is,
and that it's different from human or other apes or whatever.
So I got involved basis everybody else. I paid my
thirty dollars and at the time you had to to
get a copy of the online copy of the paper,

(17:47):
and so then I went to work from there.

Speaker 2 (17:50):
Your background isn't necessarily in DNA, as you said, it's
physical chemistry, not the organic chemistry. So how much of
a learning curve re looking? Yet at the time.

Speaker 1 (18:01):
Well, here's the thing as a chemist and a chemistry
student way back in the sixties. I knew about DNA.
I knew its structure, I knew what its function was.
I remember when the Nobel Prize was given for the structure,
and so it wasn't exactly a foreign subject to me,

(18:25):
although I had never done any actual research in the area.
And the biggest learning curve, which wasn't all that bad,
really was how to use the National Center for Biotechnology
databases to search a sequence to find what it matches.

(18:50):
And these are this is free access. Your taxes are
paying for it, and I'm happy to say in this
case you're getting your money's worth if you take the
time to learn how to use the software, the search engine,
and how to interpret your results, which is a little
bit more difficult. So I'm the owner of two pats

(19:16):
in databases, So I mean using databases is not a
strange subject. And quite frankly, you're comparing two strings of
just four different characters each.

Speaker 3 (19:31):
Repeated.

Speaker 1 (19:32):
You know, A, TG and C the four bases, and
you don't have to be a biochemist to do that.
It's a mathematical problem, quite frankly, And so that's how
I approached it.

Speaker 2 (19:47):
Yeah, and just as a very brief primer just for
anybody and maybe some young people who haven't got into
chemistry or biology at or anything like that. Your DNA
are basically strands inside of the cells, inside your bodily cells.
And these strands are like the code of how cells
replicate themselves. And your DNA is in every single one

(20:09):
of these little strands. And I think it's safe to
say there are billions of these strands throughout your body.
And again, if doctor Hart, if I'm saying anything that's
incorrect because I'm reaching back in my memory twenty years
to college and whatever else, if I say anything incorrect,
please jump in and correct me or add to it
if there's something else that's correct. Everybody's seeing these double
helix things look looks like a ladder that's twisted, and

(20:30):
then the rungs of the ladder are actually chemicals that
bond to one another. And when doctor Hart mentioned the
AGC and T, those are abbreviations for I forget. I
don't know what kind of stuff they are, but I'm
sure you do. But they're basically the code. And by
having billions of connections of these four different chemicals that

(20:51):
make the rungs of the twisty ladder. The helix in
other words, or the double helix that gives us a
unique code code that basically tells the cells how to
reproduce themselves exactly. And of course, every once in a
while everything mistakes are made and the mistakes are introduced,
and that's what we call well, that's basically some sort

(21:14):
of change in the in the in the pattern, and
that's how evolution happens because those changes become more prominent,
et cetera. This is literally the basis of all biology essentially,
is what we're talking about. So all biological sciences rely
on this information and evolution, including human evolution. Sorry folks,
but it's true. So if you like going to the doctor,

(21:36):
can you owe the doctor's knowledge and education to this
subject that we're talking about now. So, but at the
basis of it, all's chemistry. We're big bags of chemistry
that are doing stuff, and our chemistry replicates ours, replicates
itself through this DNA. The DNA is the code that
tells how to replicate itself.

Speaker 3 (21:56):
Yes, that's very true.

Speaker 1 (21:58):
It codes for protein and proteins are what make your
body work structural as in muscles and bones and things,
and then enzymatic which are the catalysts for all your
biochemical reactions. And just to pick up on what you said,

(22:19):
your description of it is called the central dogma of
modern biochemistry, and you're absolutely right.

Speaker 3 (22:27):
Everything is traced back to that.

Speaker 1 (22:31):
And speaking of chemistry and the relationship and my background
and so on. Actually, it's interesting that the two Nobel
Prize winners were a microbiologist and a physicist who applied
principles of organic chemistry, which I studied and did very well,

(22:52):
and to understand how these bases hydrogen bonded together and
how the structure wrapped around that. And so they're operating
in the field that was not their own, and they
got interestingly, the Nobel Prize in medicine and physiology, yet

(23:13):
another area. So this just shows you how modern science
is very interdisciplinary. And don't ever let anybody tell you,
as some have done on this in this controversy, that
you don't have the background to do this, because the

(23:34):
Nobel Prize winners on paper didn't either.

Speaker 2 (23:38):
Yeah, I think it's fair to say that many of
science's greatest advances have come about because someone who didn't
study that particular field got their nose into it and
applied their own knowledge towards something else. And like, as
you said, one of the people who got the Nobel
Prize was a physicist dabbling in basically, you know, organic chemistry.

(23:59):
But he had certain knowledge and you wanted to apply
it to this subject. And I think Bigfoot is like
that too. There's so many different aspects of the subject.
And so you're a physical chemist who's now looking into
the DNA stuff with your own perspective and your own expertise,
and that kind of stuff should be welcomed. People of
all backgrounds and bodies of knowledge should be welcome to

(24:21):
look at anything, because you never know what new eyes
put on something are going to reveal.

Speaker 3 (24:26):
Yes, I totally agree. I couldn't agree more.

Speaker 4 (24:31):
Stay tuned for more Bigfoot and Beyond with Cliff and Bogo.
Will be right back after these messages.

Speaker 2 (24:42):
Okay, Well, so you downloaded the paper, you paid your
thirty bucks, and you started reading through it. What were
your first thoughts on either the data or the procedures
or anything like that.

Speaker 1 (24:53):
Well, a lot of the details were unknown to me.
I had to go look up for re and study
them by a couple of books and download some papers
from the internet and so on, because like I've said,
I'm not a biochemist, but I was able to understand

(25:15):
it after a while. It was to me at first
a very wonderful discovery, and I felt that this would
be a good opportunity for me to delve a little deeper,
to take the published sequences and in fact check the

(25:43):
results and the matches to the database, and that I
would learn a lot about the whole subject of DNA
by doing this, and also species identification, and so that's
what interests me and what.

Speaker 3 (26:01):
Got me started.

Speaker 1 (26:02):
And to be honest, and I've mentioned this before, at
first I thought she the paper was correct and its
identification a lot of things were like ninety five percent
matches and so on that to somebody just getting into

(26:23):
this particular database seemed like a good enough match. To me,
I later realized that that's not true. If you want
a species match, you really have to be above ninety
nine percent. In most cases, like all of the humans

(26:44):
in the world their DNA matches by ninety nine and
a half percent. All our differences are in a half
percent or so.

Speaker 2 (26:53):
Something that you mentioned is because ninety five percent, you know,
for people who going to school and stuff. That's an
a that's a solid on whatever paper you get or
you know, DESI digg and it sounds good enough to
me too. But then again you have to take a
few steps back and and is this why that ninety
five percent is not good enough? I think is my question.
You have to take a few steps back and realize

(27:13):
that these these pairs, these matchings that were getting ninety
five percent matches on, aren't there billions of those? And
ninety five percent out of a billion is kind of
a big miss in a lot of ways.

Speaker 3 (27:26):
Well, you're right.

Speaker 1 (27:27):
The human nuclear genome is three point three billion based
pairs long. The mitochondrial genome that's in the mitochondria and
what you inherit from your mother.

Speaker 3 (27:42):
Only is much smaller.

Speaker 1 (27:45):
It's sixteen thousand, five hundred and sixty eight base pairs
only a lot shorter, so it's used a lot more
for identifications.

Speaker 2 (27:57):
And that's what doctor Ketcham was doing, is that, well
she did both.

Speaker 1 (28:01):
She did nuclear sequencing and mitochondrial sequencing.

Speaker 3 (28:07):
But getting back to the ninety five percent.

Speaker 1 (28:12):
There are genes that are called conserved because they don't
change much through evolution. They're working so well, that there's
no biological drive for them to change, because all mammals
have a lot of similarities. Okay, even though we look

(28:34):
and eat differently, and this and that, our breathing apparatus,
our heart, and a lot of this stuff doesn't change
that much. Maybe only the five percent change, you know,
also ninety five percent. I can show you sequences human
and there that match ninety five percent, and not the whole.

Speaker 3 (28:58):
Genome, but certain regions of it.

Speaker 1 (29:00):
And that's where I think the problems came in this paper,
not recognizing that fact and accepting.

Speaker 3 (29:10):
Ninety five percent.

Speaker 1 (29:13):
When it matched so many different things, and throwing up
your hands and saying, well, it must be a new
species because it doesn't match anything, but it matches everything
ninety five percent.

Speaker 2 (29:25):
Okay, And I think you just brought up something really
important as well, is that we're talking about sequences of
DNA versus the entire genome. Maybe we can clarify that
for our readers, because ninety five percent of the entire
genome may be a different story. Because people have probably
heard I say to my presentations all the time that
you know, humans and chimpanzees are a ninety eight point
something percent identical in their DNA, so ninety five doesn't

(29:48):
seem that far off. We're sixty percent identical to earthworms
for an I understand. So when you talk about a
sequence of DNA, contrast that, for our audience, please with
the entire genome. What are we talking about here?

Speaker 1 (30:00):
Very good question, because the paper in its title even
said it had sequenced three complete genomes, nuclear genomes, which
are as I said, would have been if we're human
or like human, about three point three billion base spaars.

Speaker 3 (30:21):
Actually they didn't do that at all.

Speaker 1 (30:25):
They used only chromosome eleven reference, which has one hundred
and thirty five million bay spaars, and of that the
sequences they got were much smaller still, two point seven million,
point five million and two point one million, respectively base pairs,

(30:52):
nowhere near the three point three billion and not even
near the whole chroma so eleven. So right away there's
there's a bit of an offset, and this is where
the problem came. They used a human reference, so all

(31:14):
the sequences they got were what I just mentioned, were
conserved genes that didn't differ that much between a bear
and a monkey and a human and an ape. And
so it's a it's a preconceived notion there that led
to the problems.

Speaker 2 (31:34):
Now, when you say a human reference, what what is
that are there? They're comparing their their their strands to
a human and looking for similarities.

Speaker 1 (31:42):
Yes, when when you do this uh sequencing of these
large genomes, you essentially break up the DNA into small
sentiments and somatically and then.

Speaker 3 (31:58):
You won approach.

Speaker 1 (32:02):
Is to take those small sequences and if you're pretty
sure of what you have or that it's close to something,
you use a complete reference sequence.

Speaker 3 (32:14):
And human DNA is known all three point three.

Speaker 1 (32:18):
Billion base and you match these little segments to various
regions of this reference and that allows you to then
put them back together and come up with a larger sequence, sometimes.

Speaker 3 (32:36):
A whole genome, sometimes not.

Speaker 1 (32:39):
And so it's a quick way to match these segments up,
and since they overlap, you can get a longer segment
from smaller ones. Now, this is only appropriate if you
know what you're dealing with, or at least what genus

(33:01):
or family of animals. Otherwise, the sequence if it's far,
if the reference is far from your actual unknown sequence,
the only things that are going to match are going
to be these conserved genes or fragments of genes that
haven't changed very much, and you won't get a complete

(33:25):
genome like they didn't because the bear doesn't match the
human very well.

Speaker 2 (33:30):
So it sounds like they started off with an assumption
that if these are sasquatched, you know, samples, then we
should be able to compare to them a human because
humans are also primates, which seems like a logical assumption,
but it sounds like maybe what happened is almost like
comparing like maybe a human to a tree. Obviously, humans
and trees, you know, our last common ancestor is a

(33:51):
long time ago, not really good comparison, but when you
look at a human, we kind of have a trunk
and we kind of have branches, and we can see
the similarity is owing in hair because of the leaves.
We can kind of see the similarities between humans and
trees structurally. And so they were looking for something and
they found it, even though if it wasn't there is
that was kind of similar.

Speaker 1 (34:12):
They found fragments of it, these conserved genes, but they
got so little of.

Speaker 3 (34:20):
The total genome, you know, two point.

Speaker 1 (34:23):
Seven at most million out of you know, one less
than one tenth of a percent of the whole genome.
For even the largest of their three sequences, two point
seven million out of three point three billion is less
than a tenth of a percent. It's less than one
one thousandth So yes, it's a preconceived notion. And when

(34:46):
you have an unknown species and you want to just
open the book to anything, there's another technique called dnovo,
which doesn't use a reference, but looks at all theseents
in the computer, of course, and looks at where they overlap.

(35:06):
You know, where several bases are the same at the
end points of two.

Speaker 3 (35:11):
Of the small sequences.

Speaker 1 (35:14):
And then you link those two together based on their
common several bases at the tips, and then that forms
a bigger sequence and then you can link it up
on its ends with some more of the fragments. So
dnovo means just a priori and without any assumptions, and

(35:36):
that's what should have been done, and then their results
would have been much clearer as to the species involved.

Speaker 2 (35:44):
So you would and you actually took doctor Ketchum's data
itself and you ran that through the system again, Is
that is that what you did for the next step.

Speaker 1 (35:55):
Yes, I took I would call it her results that
is her sequences and I and you know, there was
no way to question those in terms of their accuracy.
You can question how they were obtained, but actually I

(36:15):
just assumed that the sequencing for.

Speaker 3 (36:18):
What it was was correct limited.

Speaker 1 (36:21):
And then I searched the National Center for Biotechnology Information's databases,
and you have to search more than one there, and
I came up with these matches which were for one
of the sequences was a black bear, another was human
and so close to human you really couldn't tell, now

(36:44):
sasquatches that close to human, well, that could be one.

Speaker 3 (36:48):
And then the third one matched a match dogs very
very well.

Speaker 1 (36:53):
And that's the one that came from the down spout
with the bite marks.

Speaker 3 (36:57):
And you know primates used the bite in the metal,
dogs bite everything, so that.

Speaker 1 (37:03):
Kind of matches. You know, that's not proof, but it's
it's consistent, let's say. So that's that's what I did.
And then I took chro mitochondrial results, which you know
you're in your minded chondria and your cell are these
other sequences which are circular and fifteen.

Speaker 3 (37:26):
Six sixteen thousand viral on sixty eight.

Speaker 1 (37:29):
Bases plus her mind is a couple and those are
inherited from your mother because the.

Speaker 3 (37:36):
Egg has mitochondria but the sperm does not.

Speaker 1 (37:40):
And they're a very good way to identify species and
you don't need to sequence that whole sixteen thousand, just
small segments are characteristic of various species. And she did this,
and of course she sent it to a have that
only deals in human things. Family Tree DNA is one

(38:06):
of these genetic ancestral type sequencing labs, and they do
a good job on humans. They did mine, I did
my wife's. We you know, I use those as kind
of references. And the problem there is their methodology. Their

(38:27):
sequencing technique is designed for humans only.

Speaker 3 (38:31):
And I prove that because I sent them some horseesome.

Speaker 1 (38:35):
Cat, and dog DNA and they didn't sequence at all,
it didn't amplify, which proves that, you know, it's not
a general technique. It's only for humans. And what they
got could easily be attributed to human contamination, or at
least you couldn't exclude that because only a human technique

(38:58):
was used, and you could have, you know, a bulk
of their DNA and just a little bit of human DNA.
This method is so sensitive that if it's specific for.

Speaker 3 (39:11):
A human it's going to pick that human d A
and sequence it.

Speaker 2 (39:15):
Now, what if we had a close relative to a human,
like maybe I'm an advocate, for example, of the paranthropists
hypothesis as sasquatches are probably paranthroposines or might be paranthropasines.
I should say, would would the human I'm going to
say primers? Is that the right word? Would the human?
Would the human primers amplify DNA from a paranthropis scene

(39:37):
I know there's no way to test that, but or
from a chimpanzee for a bonobo for example, would what
would be effect? What would the effect of a human
primer on a bonobo sequence be?

Speaker 1 (39:48):
If the primers were chosen appropriately, they could also sequence
our amplify and sequence apes and possibly you know, if
you had it some more ancient humans.

Speaker 3 (40:03):
It might depend on what region you prime.

Speaker 1 (40:08):
But because apes, for example, are so close to human genetically,
you would probably with those human primers you'd probably get amplification.
You'd have to do an experiment, you know, with some
ap DNA and the human primers, and that would answer
the question. You know, it's a good question, by the

(40:29):
way that I don't know anybody's done anything about I
could look at it.

Speaker 2 (40:34):
Yeah, but again, I think maybe this is an example.
It's like, you know, Cliff with a degree in music,
offering questions to someone with a deep level expertise, new
eyes on the same subject often yield you results. And
I think that's we're talking about that a little bit earlier.

Speaker 1 (40:50):
Certainly raise good questions as you do. I didn't know
your degree was in music.

Speaker 2 (40:56):
Yeah, I played jazz guitar.

Speaker 3 (40:58):
Oh that's right now, remember. Yeah, So it's all in
the primers. And when.

Speaker 1 (41:08):
Bart Katino and independently Tyler Huggins sent what were reported
to be part of the same sample that Melbo Ketchum
got number twenty six, when they sent them to independent
labs and their primers were used, they got bear DNA

(41:32):
sequences and they got a little bit of human too
when they used human primers, but there was much less
of the human DNA than there was the bear DNA.
So that kind of proves the case that the human
was the contaminant and the bear was the bulk and
not the opposite.

Speaker 2 (41:52):
Yeah, that sure sounds like it. And you know, one
of the astounding things that I took away from your
book is that apparently the correct me if I'm wrong again,
please But when she ran the results, black Bear was
not part of the database at all. Is that correct?

Speaker 1 (42:10):
It was, but there were far fewer sequences in there
than any of the other major bears. For example, polar
bear and Panda have been studied more because they are threatened,
and so the black bear data was limited, and the

(42:31):
largest sequence that I found that match was only two
hundred and ninety base pairs, and being a little bit
new in this, I thought that that was not enough
to prove anything that Even though this two hundred and
ninety matched, I thought it was probably a conserved region
and I missed the boat there, of carse, so did she.

(42:55):
Until I started looking later at other databases and data
from outside sources, was I able to show much better
match to black Bear.

Speaker 3 (43:08):
So essentially there was one database in that.

Speaker 1 (43:15):
Collection at the National Center that had she looked, she
would have found the black bear.

Speaker 3 (43:21):
But I didn't find that database and explored until later
as well.

Speaker 1 (43:28):
You know, it's not the most common of their databases
that are searched. Now however, there's more black bear data,
and in fact, one of the databases has the complete
black bear genome, and I addressed this in one of
the chapters in my book where I searched that, and boy,
you get excellent. A lot of the subsequences match one

(43:52):
hundred percent. The reason they all don't are just the
same as the reason all humans don't match exactly one another,
because we have mutations from one another and so the
Black Bears. So you know, getting over ninety nine point
five percent is really quite good.

Speaker 3 (44:11):
And I got a lot of hundreds. I got a
lot of ninety nine point nines.

Speaker 1 (44:15):
And you know, so that that was really the I
was so thrilled when they finally came out with that
entire nuclear genome, which was not available to Melow to
catch them, but there were other sources that you could
have searched.

Speaker 2 (44:32):
So the longer the sequence, as well as in combination
with the number of I guess samples, I guess all,
that helps really solidify and zoom in on the actual
creature that we're doing the testing on.

Speaker 3 (44:50):
Actually, yes, you're very right.

Speaker 1 (44:52):
The longer the sequence that you match, the more likely
you are to have.

Speaker 3 (44:59):
A correct match and that you can draw a conclusion.

Speaker 1 (45:03):
And this is something I'm sorry to say, how being
a newcomer and stuff to some of this a lot
of the current geneticists.

Speaker 3 (45:13):
They all want to break up.

Speaker 1 (45:14):
A sequence into little sixty base pair nuggets sixty to
one hundred, and then they search those and they try
to put it all back together. And it's really I
can match a human sixty base pair sequence to almost

(45:35):
any mammal you choose, because it's if I pick a
conserved gene, they're going to be the same. People were
making comments, these are geneticists that mails catch them. Sequences
matched a pig apossum all kinds of stuff, Well, a

(45:55):
short segment of it could, but not the whole length
of what even her whole sequence two point seven million
based pairs, or even a large fracture. Most of the
sequences that I got matches for were the best ones
were in the thousands of base pairs over a thousand,

(46:19):
and that's very convincing.

Speaker 4 (46:23):
Stay tuned for more Bigfoot and Beyond with Cliff and
Bogo will be right back after these messages. Now, I
thought that it was very charitable in your book because
people on the outside are the people who are strong
advocates of the Ketchum study.

Speaker 2 (46:44):
They'll see this as a takedown, and I don't see
it as that at all. I see this as a
peer review, a necessary step in the scientific process, and
if we are advocating for the introduction of science into
the Bigfoot subject, this is it. This is the growing pains.
You know, sometimes you're going to be wrong, and that's
just part of game. And I think it's a femem quote.
It says, if you're doing science, you're not being wrong,

(47:04):
you're not doing it right. And I think this is
an important thing. But I think it's very charitable of you.
In the middle of this book, you said she may
very well have sasquatch samples, but these particular ones that
I'm speaking to are not sasquatch. What do you think
that the chances of that are and what steps might

(47:26):
be taken to verify that or explore that possibility.

Speaker 3 (47:30):
Well, that's a good question too.

Speaker 1 (47:33):
One of the chapters that I think you're probably referring to,
I found some very unusual mutations in several of her
mitochondrial sequences. These are the ones that are sixteen thousand
plus base bears very unusual, and in combination, the database

(47:57):
have no humans that had even two of them. These
the three major ones, and certainly none had all three
of them. However, I also searched the other primates by family,
and I found that these mutations were much more common

(48:20):
in other primates. Not so much in chimps or gorillas,
but in other primates, the monkeys, the lorises, all the others.

Speaker 2 (48:32):
Did you test to ringetans many chance, Yes, I.

Speaker 1 (48:35):
Did, and the sequences didn't They were better. There were
more of them in orangutangs than humans, but still not
very many, so not very good matches over a number
of samples.

Speaker 3 (48:56):
So there's a possible HYPOTHETI.

Speaker 1 (49:00):
Is there that maybe Bigfoot has some latent primate.

Speaker 3 (49:10):
Sequences and it's mitochondrial.

Speaker 2 (49:13):
DNA, because that's that's something that I don't think of
bigfooter is explore because I said just five minutes ago
that I'm an advocate of the paranthropist theory of sasquatch,
And of course everybody knows about gigantic Gigantipithecus and all
that jazz. But something that I don't think is given
enough press so to speak, or you know, or enough
talk or enough attention, is that sasquatches maybe something completely novel,

(49:35):
completely new in some ways, and however unlikely that is,
and I'm not saying like a new family or something
like that. But I'm saying, is what if some sort
of you know, monkey and I don't know. I mean,
there's other possibilities, however unlikely they are. There's other possibilities
than the apor human sort of thing. I think is

(49:57):
extraordinarily unlikely. Actually, but it's p and maybe this isn't.
I mean, I'm not saying this is supporting that idea
at all, but results like this right when I found
these mutations and are more common in monkeys and apes,
that at least opens the door to that maybe we're
looking at something completely unexpected, and I think that's an

(50:17):
interesting and exciting possibility. I don't think that the data
supports it at this point, but it's at least something
to kind of kick around to see if any data
might result that.

Speaker 3 (50:26):
Yeah, I agree, it's uh.

Speaker 1 (50:28):
There needs to be a lot more data collected and
results and interpretations of that before we could draw any
kind of conclusion. But I find it very interesting that
of the samples that shared these unusual mutations, they were
from different areas.

Speaker 3 (50:48):
One was from New.

Speaker 1 (50:49):
Mexico, a couple of them are from California, And I
think I think there was one from British Columbia too,
So it just you know, it's unlikely that these were
all sequencing errors, all the same base position positions.

Speaker 3 (51:11):
There's something there.

Speaker 1 (51:13):
These samples are related, even though they come from different
areas of North America, and so much more data needs
to be collected, But it just seemed like an interesting possibility.

Speaker 3 (51:30):
That's all, a possibility.

Speaker 2 (51:32):
Like you say, do you think there's any avenues of
exploring these three mutations that might yield some results we
can work with somehow well?

Speaker 1 (51:44):
I think if people collect what they think, you know,
hair samples or vcs or whatever. Of course, the closer
you can get to a provincing of it, you know,
like a ing the sasquatch rub against a tree or
something and then getting the hair would be a lot

(52:06):
better than just picking up a hair in the woods
not knowing where it came from. But if some if
these mutations persist in other samples, even if you don't
know exactly where the sample came from, but it comes
out to be close to human like that, then I
think we have something. Because these are extremely rare on mutations.

(52:31):
I mean, no human in the database has more than
one of them, and very few have even one of them,
and none have two or three of these like they
appear in those sequences in the paper, so you know
it's a possible avenue. I think people should keep these

(52:53):
in mind as they do their own DNA sequences.

Speaker 2 (52:58):
Have you explored in investigated and do a needy research
into the DNA sequencing of ancient humans? And I think
primary amongst these would be homodenisovans because that entire species
was initially identified by DNA. They had a phalangi bone
I remember a fingerbone in a cave, and they initially

(53:19):
thought it was Neanderthal, but when they ran a DNA
sequence on it, they having the entire Neanderthal genome. Then
comparing this to that, they said, this is not that,
this is a new species. And since then, of course,
other samples have been discovered. A jawbone. It turns out
what we had possession of a jawbone since the nineteen
eighties and misidentified it. I think they identified it as

(53:40):
a Homo heedelber against. This turned out to be homodenisovan
upon DNA testing, and even as recently as July twenty
twenty one. The thing that made the big news is
that the dragon man, you know, Homo. I forgot what
the name of it that they gave it to this thing,
a big, big skull out of China. Some people think
that it's a new speed sees of human and others

(54:02):
think that perhaps is that's the first, you know, skull
remnants of a Denisovan being discovered. So there's a there's
a growing field in palaeoanthropology about DNA sequencing of ancient humans.
Have you explored those avenues at all and how they
might be useful for what we're all trying to do
to prove the Sasquatch.

Speaker 1 (54:23):
Yeah, Actually, I am aware of the Denosovan results and
I've looked at them, and I always include Neanderthal and
Carl Magnum Denosovan in my search. Is I'm not, I
wasn't aware of this recent discovery in July. Maybe you

(54:46):
can send me something that would lead me to the
published result there and was d NA sequence from that
sample or not?

Speaker 3 (54:56):
No?

Speaker 2 (54:56):
No, they just dug up a skull basically, or the
at least the back part of skulls.

Speaker 1 (55:00):
It may be too old, but they it might be
worth trying and anyway, so that's interesting too. But yeah,
I have I have when I do some searches that
I'm not sure and I think it's human like, maybe
I always include these other.

Speaker 3 (55:20):
Humanoids let's call them.

Speaker 2 (55:22):
Do you do what kind of primers they used? Probably
probably a human one, I imagine, probably probably.

Speaker 3 (55:28):
Or you can also use universal.

Speaker 1 (55:31):
Primate primer if you pick the right region and form
a primer based on that, it can sequence prime aids,
but nothing else.

Speaker 4 (55:44):
Stay tuned for more Bigfoot and beyond with Cliff and Bobo.
We'll be right back after these messages.

Speaker 2 (55:56):
If you're if you're using a more general primer, do
you get more general results?

Speaker 3 (55:59):
That's right, you do.

Speaker 1 (56:01):
You can use a mammalian primer, a fish primer, all
vertebrates if you're if they're carefully selected, you can pick
the group that you're focusing on and eliminate everything else.

Speaker 2 (56:17):
But then after that you can have to drill down
a little bit to get specifics.

Speaker 1 (56:20):
Or yeah, yeah, actually, if you pick a more general one,
then and this is what I'm doing now. I have
some environmental DNA samples from water sources in southeast Oklahoma,
and I'm working through that data. Now, environmental DNA we
hadn't talked about, but It's somewhat like ancient DNA in

(56:43):
that it's got more than one kind of DNA in it,
and so stream water, of course has everything that ever
went into that water, and so it takes I found.
It's a data you get, and I'm writing computer programs

(57:04):
to sort through it so I don't have to do
it manually, because from one sample you get tens of
thousands of sequences by this what's called next generation sequencing.
It's in a flow cell and there are little sites
that are laser scanned, and each site produces a sequence

(57:25):
for you. And some of them are the same as others,
and some of them are different, and you've got to
get rid of the duplicates and focus on the unique ones.
And I've been working on this for months now and
I'm getting there. I'm not ready to report anything yet,
but I'm getting a pretty good focus on the human

(57:47):
like sequences in these water samples.

Speaker 2 (57:50):
Now, are these water samples taken from running water or
still water? And does that even matter?

Speaker 3 (57:55):
Yeah, A good, good question. Mostly running water.

Speaker 1 (57:58):
The more interesting areas were running water, but I do
have some from lakes and ponds as well. I kind
of wanted to compare them you know, and my biggest
hopes are from certain running as streams and river.

Speaker 2 (58:16):
Just me thinking about this process, wouldn't running water disperse
the genetic material too much? They are still like genetic
material is so prevalent in the environment you can't get
rid of it, no matter what the ladder the ladder, Okay.

Speaker 3 (58:32):
I mean, it's just amazing.

Speaker 1 (58:34):
If I put a fingerprint on a glass slide, they
can sequence that at least the mitochondrial sequence.

Speaker 3 (58:45):
You know. It is so the techniques are so sensitive.

Speaker 1 (58:50):
The amplification process takes sequences and every cycle doubles them,
and so you know, in just an hour or so
or two you get billions and billions of replicants of

(59:11):
that sequence. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (59:13):
So it's an exponential growth as opposed to linear then,
because if you're doubling and doubling and doubling.

Speaker 1 (59:19):
Two times two times too, Yeah, geometric or you know,
you could call it exponential, it's geometric.

Speaker 3 (59:25):
It's a mathematical terminology.

Speaker 1 (59:28):
But yeah, that's what's so powerful about this. You know,
they can take fingerprints even and I've seen the paper
where they took some old forensic samples where the cases
are all solved and they kept them anonymous, but they
were able with half a centimeter of hair to do

(59:51):
a mitochondri DNA sequencing half a centimeter of hair getting
the medulla out of that.

Speaker 3 (59:58):
So it's that sense now.

Speaker 2 (01:00:00):
Of course, on sasquatch hair, one of the characteristics that
doctor Henter Fahrenbach has determined is that there's a fragmentary
or complete lack of medulla. Does does that pretty much
confound our efforts here to get DNA out of hair
for sasquatches or is there another Is there a workaround
for that?

Speaker 3 (01:00:17):
It makes it extremely difficult. I would say.

Speaker 1 (01:00:22):
If you can find a region where there is some medulla,
then that would be good. And there may be some
DNA even when there's no medulla.

Speaker 3 (01:00:31):
I'm not sure about that, but I think there may
be some.

Speaker 2 (01:00:34):
Yeah, because the hair it sells protein. Am I right?

Speaker 1 (01:00:37):
Largely that there's our keratin it's called, and in the
follicles and the cuticle I mean, and then inside there's
there's DNA in that medulla.

Speaker 3 (01:00:54):
The cortex I don't think has much.

Speaker 1 (01:00:56):
I think it's mostly protein, but inside the medulla the
some DNA. And of course with a hair sample like that,
you might also have some good DNA on the outside
of it from the same animal. Got to be careful
because there could be other animals that at ate or
came in contact with.

Speaker 3 (01:01:16):
The hair, you know.

Speaker 1 (01:01:18):
But you know, animals rub their hair and stuff and
sweat on it and whatever, and so the outside can
be studied too by dissolving the DNA off of it.

Speaker 2 (01:01:31):
Would you have any tips for our Bigfooter listeners about
how to go about collecting samples of whatever that could
potentially yield DNA results.

Speaker 1 (01:01:43):
Well, there's some that are just not my ideas by
any means that a lot of people like Todd Disstel
had mentioned and some of his podcasts and Jeff Melderman others.
You have to be careful you don't contaminate it. The
best thing is to use some sterile forceps. You can

(01:02:04):
buy them in individual packets from a forensic warehouse supply warehouse,
and gloves and a mask so you don't breathe on it,
and I put something on your head to make sure
you don't drip sweat or hair or anything or dander

(01:02:25):
if on it either, so you kind of go in
like a doctor does at an operation. You could even
put on a special scrub suit, you know, if you
really want to be good about it and try to
try to keep you know, a really clean front to
the sample, and of course put it in a sterile

(01:02:47):
container and preserve it in alcohol is usually.

Speaker 3 (01:02:51):
The way they do it.

Speaker 1 (01:02:53):
And this has been described online, so this is not new.
But I would really think hard about what kind of
analysis you want to do, because when you say a
DNA analysis, that's very general, and as we've mentioned, primers
are all important, and whether you want to do mitochondrial

(01:03:17):
or whole nuclear genome, I'd start with the mitochondrial frankly,
and what region of it do you want to sequence,
et cetera, et cetera. So there's a lot of details
that need to be thought about and discussed with the analysts,
the laboratory.

Speaker 2 (01:03:36):
And not the least of which is the funding of
all this, because this whole process is quite expensive still,
isn't it.

Speaker 1 (01:03:42):
Yeah?

Speaker 3 (01:03:42):
I found that out.

Speaker 1 (01:03:43):
I self funded these environmental samples, and you know, I
can afford it, but I'm I can't.

Speaker 3 (01:03:53):
Do that all the time. It'd be nice to get
a group of people.

Speaker 1 (01:03:58):
And a go fundme some of this work, and I
think I'm hoping that I can get some results that
are promising enough to encourage other people to go out
and do this kind of thing. And if I get
this software that these programs completed and refine, some.

Speaker 3 (01:04:18):
Average people can use them.

Speaker 1 (01:04:21):
This could be a huge advantage to people collecting these
environmental samples. And you know, a stream is kind of
nice in that you get stuff from could be miles away.
You know, you don't have to be right on top
of your source. What happens is all these animals slough

(01:04:44):
off DNA when they go through the water, the fissure
already there, and aquatic animals and so on. I got
some beaver results, for example, I got black bear too,
and other other mammals, deer, mice and stuff. But you know,
it's kind of nice that way. But also you've got

(01:05:10):
to go through your results very carefully and understand what
you have. And since there are other people in the woods,
you know, urinating, defecating, fluffing off hair and hair and
dandriff and stuff, and going through the water, it's on

(01:05:30):
their clothes, their DNA and everything, you know you're going
to get some other human results.

Speaker 3 (01:05:37):
And what one needs to do is.

Speaker 1 (01:05:40):
Fine sequences that are different, even just a mutation or
two from from other humans and also find them more
than once. As I said, in one sample, you're getting
tens of thousands of sequences. Well, if just one of
these shows something unusual, it's not convincing.

Speaker 3 (01:06:01):
You also have to look at the air scores.

Speaker 1 (01:06:04):
On these and see if it was a good call
as they call it, for the base and you got
to have more confirmation of that same sequence in the sample,
and then to compare different samples at different times or
different places in the stream and hopefully.

Speaker 3 (01:06:24):
There's some similarities there. So that's what I'm going through now.

Speaker 2 (01:06:28):
Now, if you're testing stream water, as I'm listening to
this and thinking, okay, there's DNA material permeates the environment essentially,
maybe does it make any sense to actually test water
from larger rivers because there's a higher chance with all
the feeder streams and whatever else, that our target species

(01:06:50):
has sunk their feet into some sort of tributary of
that larger river, kind of like a bigger net in
a way, if that makes sense.

Speaker 1 (01:06:59):
Yeah, both, And there is something to be said for
the larger river just as you say, it collects from
a lot more tributaries. However, you're also going to get
a lot of other things that, of course you won't
know what tributary you've got the interesting DNA from, but

(01:07:20):
you're going to get a lot more human stuff just
from people who live in the area, and septic systems
and stuff.

Speaker 2 (01:07:29):
That maybe say background noise kind of.

Speaker 1 (01:07:31):
Yeah, if you use smaller tributaries, you can focus on
an area and it'll also lead you, hopefully to a
place where you're more likely to actually observe some sasquatch.
So I think both are in order as far as

(01:07:51):
I can tell now.

Speaker 2 (01:07:53):
Now, if we have a water source for the city
of Portland nearby called Bull Run Watershed, and most of
the bigfoot activity in this particular part where Oregon where
I live, it's kind of centered around the watershed. It's
pretty solid. At this point, I think it's safe to
say that there are sasquatches in the watershed fairly frequently,
because it's tens of thousands of acres where no one

(01:08:15):
is allowed. It's literally a twenty four to twenty five
thousand dollars fine for fishing a tributary to this particular river.
It's well, you know, national insecurity is a really good
reason to have high national security and they're worried about
poisoning or I don't know what it is, but the
bull Run supplies the city of Portland with its water,
and there are sasquatch reports all around it, all around it,

(01:08:37):
and I've even gotten a handful from within it from
the people who work for the Portland Water Company. So
if you have a target area where you're pretty confident
sasquatches are a pretty sizeable river, I might add, well,
this is no creek or a trickle. Would you target
particular river systems and hopes of higher results, or like

(01:08:58):
the Mill Creek water shed outside of wall Wallet where
a ton of evidence has been taken. Have you tried
that avenue of actually targeting specifical ones.

Speaker 1 (01:09:05):
Yes, Actually, the area that I collected these samples from
has been thought reported by others to have a lot
of sightings and rocks thrown at them and all kinds
of activity. And it's also where I saw my near
where I saw my sighting. So yeah, targeting certain area,

(01:09:27):
I mean I wouldn't go. I wouldn't go in the.

Speaker 3 (01:09:30):
Middle of Kansas and just do any river. You know,
I think you're right.

Speaker 1 (01:09:34):
You focus on at least areas that in a larger
or smaller scale have a lot of promise.

Speaker 2 (01:09:46):
Yes, would a sasquatch have to step in the water
to slough off any DNA material, or it could have
just been nearby.

Speaker 3 (01:09:53):
It could be washed in.

Speaker 1 (01:09:55):
You know, Let's say they urinated nearby and then it rains, Well,
that's going to get at the end of the stream.
Same with defication and other ways of losing DNA in
the woods.

Speaker 3 (01:10:11):
If it's close enough, it'll wash into the stream.

Speaker 2 (01:10:15):
That's interesting because I'm not sure you're aware of who
Glenn Thomas is, but he's a witness. He's most famous
about his he saw sasquatches stacking rocks and tacking out
rodents from this tayless slope up in Mountain Hood National Forest.
But he had more than one siding. And another one
of his sidings he had he saw a sasquatch and
it basically took a dump in a river, right in
the river. And I thought that was interesting because I

(01:10:36):
know when I put my feet in water, i have
to pee, you know, So there might be some sort
of connection between those two things there. But if a
sasquatch did defecate into a river, how long could one
expect for that DNA material to stay in the river system.
I mean, has there everybody studies already investigation into that question.

Speaker 1 (01:10:59):
I'm not aware of any, but that doesn't mean there
aren't anybody.

Speaker 3 (01:11:03):
I'll say, this DNA will degrade in time.

Speaker 1 (01:11:10):
There are microbes that eat it and other things so
and chemically as well. It can hydrolyze and and so on.
So the sooner you get it the better. That's another
unknown here. When you sample a water stream, you know
how how recent was the DNA deposited, but it may

(01:11:34):
affect whether you get any results or not.

Speaker 3 (01:11:38):
But yeah, defication, that would be excellent.

Speaker 1 (01:11:41):
And if you don't get the actual stool, then the
water coming off it should have DNA in it, a
lot of it.

Speaker 3 (01:11:50):
But you'll get DNA from everything he ate as well.

Speaker 2 (01:11:54):
Yeah, yeah, that's the thing I think this hotel said.
You have to collect the stools hable form, like the screen,
the outside of it, because that's the part that would
have scraped against the intestinal walls or something.

Speaker 1 (01:12:05):
And that's the part that would get dispersed in the
water the easiest as well, or the quickest for sure.

Speaker 2 (01:12:11):
And of course the dispersion of the DNA material throughout
the river system would take some time as well. If
you're like three miles downstream, we wouldn't expect it to
be instantaneous, but maybe a few days later.

Speaker 3 (01:12:21):
Perhaps.

Speaker 1 (01:12:22):
Now I understand there's some software that allows you to
design your sampling procedures in a water shed based on
I think things like water flow rates and so on,

(01:12:43):
and typography and the topology of the network. And I
don't know what other parameters are involved, but it's used
by people interested in fish and if.

Speaker 3 (01:12:58):
They want to know the source of.

Speaker 1 (01:13:01):
The FIA shore where they breed, or this kind of question,
they use this software.

Speaker 2 (01:13:07):
Another example of the interdisciplinary studies involved in bigfoot stuff
is like hydrologists can participate in this as well.

Speaker 1 (01:13:15):
Absolutely absolutely, because you know, I didn't do any extensive.

Speaker 3 (01:13:24):
Experimental design.

Speaker 1 (01:13:25):
I just knew that these bodies of water were near
where sightings were and I just kind of randomly really
selected locations. And obviously locations are important and timing. You know,
things don't last forever, and so you probably have to

(01:13:49):
take things over a period of time and make sure
you don't miss something. And this was really a survey,
and I'm developing my methodology for interpreting the results.

Speaker 3 (01:14:01):
But it's pretty obvious that more data.

Speaker 1 (01:14:05):
Will have to be collected to be to be very
meticulous and complete.

Speaker 2 (01:14:13):
So that that sounds like that's your main focus at
this point. Moving ahead, you're working with the e DNA
studies with river systems and things like that. Is there
anything else that you're working on that would our audience
would be interested in?

Speaker 1 (01:14:27):
No?

Speaker 3 (01:14:29):
Quite.

Speaker 1 (01:14:30):
Frankly, this is my first field study. I'm not a
field biologist by any means. I'm a naturalist and an observer.
But so this this was a new experience, and obviously
I've learned a few things that I might do differently.

Speaker 3 (01:14:49):
So but yes, at the moment, this is it.

Speaker 1 (01:14:54):
I'll have to see how this works out as to
whether I want to do some more of this kind
of work and who I might also encourage to do it,
some other people that I would share some methodology with
and hopefully they might look in some different places. And
the ones you mentioned up there in Oregon near Portland

(01:15:17):
and in Washington State sound like excellent sources of water
born DNA to me.

Speaker 2 (01:15:27):
Oh yeah, yeah. I've literally had retired people from the
Portland Water Department email me and say and they called
the Bill Run water shed a Bigfoot preserve.

Speaker 3 (01:15:39):
Yeah, well I would. I would start there if I
were going to.

Speaker 1 (01:15:42):
Get involved in this, and that sounds sounds great, and
hopefully I'll have some methodology worked out. People complain that
this kind of data environmental DNA takes too much time
to sort through, and I think are doing it manually,
and I'm not sure what their focus or their objectives

(01:16:05):
are always as to what they're looking for, a survey
of everything that's there.

Speaker 3 (01:16:13):
Or some specific species or whatever.

Speaker 1 (01:16:15):
But I think I'll have some pretty good recommendations when
I'm done with this, and some software that I hope
will be easy enough to use.

Speaker 2 (01:16:25):
Well. Have you spoken to doctor Meldrum about his A
DNA samples from the Olympic Project nests now.

Speaker 1 (01:16:33):
Not specifically, but I'm going to and soon because I
would like to see if they did get any interesting
DNA sequences that may be unusual, and I certainly would
like to compare them to what I find that any
unusual DNA sequences, So that's going to happen, and I

(01:16:56):
was one of the funders of the project. Do not
believe it was promised that has also been given to
all of the funders, So I think I'm probably entitled
to something, and I don't think it's been written up formally,
has it?

Speaker 2 (01:17:14):
No, I don't think so. And I know Distel is
the guy who ran the sequences, and uh, I guess
they got fragmentary, fragmentary sequences and Distel said they are
they seem to be human. This Hotel told me in
a private conversation that he could tell me the ethnicity
of the human based on what's going on. But I
know doctor Meldrim has also been looking at other avenues

(01:17:35):
with other geneticists whatever, gentlemen from UC Davis in particular,
I believe saying that that maybe we're missing certain segments
or something, but I don't know.

Speaker 1 (01:17:45):
Well, all in this data is fragmentary in the sense
that these are fragments of the d NA and the genome.
You won't get a whole genome in one shot. It's
all broken up, okay for the most part anyway, And
so that's not unusual. But if he can tell ethnicity,

(01:18:10):
then he must be doing a fairly complete mitochondrial DNA study,
because if you're just doing a short region to identify
whether it's a human or a bear or a beaver.
You won't have enough information to say what the ethnicity
is in most cases anyway.

Speaker 2 (01:18:32):
Well, see, maybe to reach out to doctor Destel and
the doctor Jeff Milterman's.

Speaker 1 (01:18:36):
Yeah, well that's a good suggestion, and I intend to
follow up on it. I need I do need to,
and I hope I would have something to share with
them as well.

Speaker 4 (01:18:48):
Stay tuned for more Bigfoot and Beyond with Cliff and Bobo.
We'll be right back after these messages.

Speaker 2 (01:19:00):
Oh, I think you've done a huge service to the
community and the science of the of the big foot
field as well by writing your book. And it was
just a fantastic read, although I'll tell you a lot
of it went over my head, man, But the nuggets
that I took away from this, they said, oh well,
perhaps better work could have been done, maybe a missed opportunity.

(01:19:21):
But is it too late? Should we just write this off?
Or is there something that we can get out of
the Sasquatch genome project? Is there something of value that
we can take away at this point?

Speaker 1 (01:19:31):
Well, melboul Ketchum claims that she has four terabytes of
data and not all of.

Speaker 3 (01:19:40):
It appeared in the paper. If there's some more data there.

Speaker 1 (01:19:45):
There's possibly sequences that might match something different than a
bear and a dog. So I mean, she's very reluctant
to share any of that data. I've heard from other
sources who ask for it. But I think, you know,
if she opened up her raw data, not just the sequences,

(01:20:09):
but the data that went behind them, I think some other.

Speaker 3 (01:20:15):
People might be able to look at it. Now.

Speaker 1 (01:20:19):
I know one geneticist who would like to get a
hold of it and look for other things.

Speaker 2 (01:20:25):
So is that part our papers when they publish, like
journal papers, usually completely transparent with their data and whatnot.
Or is it just like I found this and they
don't let other people try to replicate the results.

Speaker 1 (01:20:37):
Or most journals require you to submit in supplementary data
because most of it is too extensive to go into
a paper, which they try to limit to just the
concise results and conclusions and some description of the method.
So yeah, it should be available, the sequences and even

(01:21:01):
the raw the raw data that leads to the sequences.
Now I don't again, that was part of the publication,
the dilemma that she had, I believe, and so yes,
the reputable journals you should be able to reproduce their

(01:21:24):
results from their raw data.

Speaker 2 (01:21:26):
That's why you publish it. I mean I'm not a scientist,
of course, but that's literally why you published, like I
found this, here's my data. You go do it too,
and you're going to see that I'm right, and you're
going to see that I'm wrong, in which case you
take the criticism and you adjust things.

Speaker 1 (01:21:41):
Well, the best scientists have that attitude. I'm not sure
all of them do, but the ones who really don't
care about who did this first and who gets all
the credit, who gets some of the credit, are very
open about out their results and their raw data, and

(01:22:04):
they welcome constructive criticism. And I certainly myself wouldn't want
to have something out there in the literature that's wrong,
it's proven to be wrong, I would join in with
those who have proven it to be so and commend
them for their efforts. You know, it's just a matter

(01:22:27):
of ego. I guess I'm interested in the truth and
I don't care if I find it or somebody else does,
or how many mistakes I make along the way. But
you know, you just that's my attitude. I think the
better sidists all feel that way too, well.

Speaker 2 (01:22:44):
Let's hope that she does share all the raw data
at some point, because if she's right, I say it
all the time on this problem, this podcast, the truth
can withstand the scrutiny. And if you don't share your data,
that is functionally the same as not having data at all.
It seems to me that all this stuff should just
be out there for other people like yourself and other
interested parties with other qualifications to look at and dissect.

(01:23:08):
And again, if it's true, if it's right, it's gonna
it'll withstand the scrutiny. It'll still be there being right
after people are done looking at it.

Speaker 1 (01:23:17):
Yeah, that's that's very true. And so I don't know.
I think we do need some new data. However, I'm
not too optimistic about what you're gonna find in her data.
I might, you know, I might be wrong. There could
be some gems in there. But if I were starting
out unless scratch, I think i'd try to get some

(01:23:40):
of my own samples and try to get some some
of my.

Speaker 2 (01:23:46):
Own new data, which is exactly what you're doing with
the stream study.

Speaker 3 (01:23:49):
It sounds like, yes, that's that's what I'm doing.

Speaker 1 (01:23:52):
And I didn't, you know, I just did this this year,
So I mean I spent eight years looking at other
people's results and trying to learn from them, especially catch
from results.

Speaker 2 (01:24:07):
All right, well, doctor Hart, I cannot thank you enough
for coming on and talking about your studies and clarifying
some of the things you've been delving into, and of
course any of our listeners out there who want to
listen or who want to check out this stuff to
an extraordinary depth. By the way, far over my head.
And I'm kind of a science nerd, a general science
nerd in general, but this book, The Sasquatch Genome Project,

(01:24:30):
a failed DNA study, is a fantastic book. Even though
I don't understand a lot of the chemistry and what
and the deep dives in here, there is a lot
to take away out of this book. And I hope,
I hope my listeners who are sincerely interested in digging
deep into the science and learning a little bit about
this stuff and they pick up this book and check

(01:24:52):
it out. I don't think it's they're going to be
disappointed at all. So, doctor Hart, thank you so much
for sharing your knowledge and spending some time with me today.

Speaker 1 (01:25:00):
Well, it's been a pleasure of Cliff talking with you
and getting some of your thoughts on these interesting subjects.
I really thank you for having me on the program,
and hopefully I can report some results, maybe justify another discussion.

Speaker 2 (01:25:18):
I'll keep my ear to the ground for your next
round of interesting results. That's for sure. You are definitely
on my radar now. I think you've done fantastic work.
So thank you so much, doctor Hart.

Speaker 3 (01:25:27):
Thank you.

Speaker 2 (01:25:28):
All right, folks, there you go again. Check out this book,
Doctor Haskell Heart's book, The Sasquatch Genome Project, a failed
DNA study. Doctor Meldrum did the forward in this thing,
and it is a lot to chew on. I'm not
going to lie to you like this is a book
that is deep. So if you are a geneticist, if
you are a chemist, if you are a biologist of

(01:25:52):
any sort, you're gonna love this. You're gonna love this.
But even if you're just a generalist science nerd, a
citizen scientist like my self, you are going to enjoy
this book. It kind of dispels a lot of the
myth and rumor, et cetera with real hard numbers in science.
Because everybody's heard about the everybody's heard about doctor Ketchum's study,

(01:26:13):
and there's all sorts of rumors and people saying this
about it and people saying that about it, and it's
just the gossip machine rolls. You know. We're the Bigfoot community.

Speaker 3 (01:26:22):
That's what we do.

Speaker 2 (01:26:23):
We gossip about other bigfooter errs because so little bigfoot
stuff happens. Well, this gets right past all that junk,
that outer layer of conspiracy and weirdness that surrounds the
Ketchum study. This gets past that, goes into the science,
crunches the numbers and talks about methodology, and it just
so much, so much is in this book. I cannot

(01:26:45):
recommend it enough. If you are a Bigfoot nerd like
me who's interested in science, get this book. I can't
recommend it enough. And I don't get anything for it.
Don't get me wrong, you didn't not sponsored or anything
like that. I just am recommending this book because it
this is fantastic. Yeah, and there you go, guys. I'm sorry.
Bubo couldn't make it obligations or obligations. He's doing production

(01:27:06):
work and that's just the way it is. Sometimes that's
but that's what we have. Two hosts. Bobo does it.
Sometimes I do it some other times and most of
the time we're together, but every time you're here and
we really really appreciate you listening and join the podcast.
If you have questions or comments, you can email us.
Go to Bigfoot and Beyond podcast dot com and push
the contact button and don't forget about Once a month

(01:27:27):
or so, Bobo and I answer your questions. So if
you want to ask Bobo and I a question about
anything at all, there are no questions that are off limits.
You can again go to the website Bigfooted Beyond podcast
dot com, push the contact button and ask us questions there.
Thank you very much for listening everyone, and as Bobo says,
keep it squatchy. Thanks for listening to this week's episode

(01:27:53):
of Bigfoot and Beyond. If you liked what you heard,
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