I tried to be very, very fair to Dr. Melba Ketchum in the slim hope she really had discovered an unknown North American primate. But the DNA, despite positive interpretations by her and some of the labs she used, has been shredded by people with far more expertise. And she tied it, repeatedly and explicitly, to "high-definition" video of a sasquatch nicknamed Matilda taken by a group called the Erickson Project.
My personal opinion, in precise scientific terms: it's all crap. The article from Doubtful News sums it up pretty well. The much-hyped footage looks like cheap theatrical costumes, the face looks like Chewbacca, and footage of sasquatches on the move looks, in ever ycase, like a like a human, with human body proportions, in a suit. Even other cryptozoological enthusiasts are dismissing this all as a hoax, and not even a good one. Ask Jay Michael Cooney, who deconstructed it some time ago in the just-linked blog, or John Kirk, who shreds it here. And it's all become tangled up with a bizarre, obvious hoax called the "Sierra Kills" where a guy claims to have shot sasquatches and collected no body parts whatsoever, and for a reason beyond comprehension, some people believed him.
Could there still be a Sasquatch? Despite the odds, I can't quite say "impossible." There are still reports by sincere people who claim they saw one closeup, and the Oxford-Sykes DNA project results are still out.
But the Ketchum-Erickson-Sierra-Olympia mess will get no more attention from me. It's time to waltz Matilda off the stage of cryptozoology forever.
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