 Okay, here we go. Our next our next talk is a Bigfoot skeptics abominable science Abominable science your moderator is gonna be Blake Smith. He of course is the host of the monster talk Podcast which you have to check out. It's so much fun. Here is the haiku lonely yet. He sits Pining for Bigfoot's agent needs to get more gigs Please welcome Blake Smith Good morning. It's wonderful to be here at the amazing meeting I think you've probably heard some really interesting stories so far if you've been attending the sessions on miracles and frauds and all kinds of fake medicine and Misguided attempts at science, but today we get really amazing because we're going to talk about monsters so Which is what I'm sure many of you've been waiting for our panel today includes Sharon Hill who does the doubtful news Website and she's a huff-puff contributor We've got Daniel lockson who does junior skeptic He has written many children's books including a fascinating one on evolution that I think is great for any kid He also is the co-author of this book abominable science Don Prothrow as well Who's written two books in backstage here just now and many others Who's a paleontologist and just a wonderful guy? They're actually here. We're promoting this book abominable science. I have Probably more than 200 paranormal topic books in my book collection and This is by far the most well-cited and well put together in beautiful book on Cryptozoology that I've ever seen in my life if you don't buy a copy you're missing out. I'm just gonna say that this wonderful To begin this talk we're gonna let Don do a short presentation that's going to sort of set the tone for this and Without further ado Don Prothrow Thanks so much Karen Stolls now as you saw it was on the program. She's in the middle of a deadline right in the middle of our meeting So you saw her running around she's upstairs editing right now sad to say As Blake very nicely said we have a new book out Daniel I'll be out there signing it after this and several more times this afternoon when there are breaks if you're interested That's a four-year labor at our part actually more than that in Daniel's case He's been working on this most his life and it brings together a collaboration of Daniel Who's been an amateur cryptozoologist to start as a child and then grew into a skeptic as an adult and my own component of it is as a kid who grew up with dinosaurs at age four never matured and Now coming at it as a scientist a paleontologist with background there is relevant to cryptozoology So what we tried to do in this was not just talk about one particular Type of cryptid like bigfoot or others There's actually five in there that we dealt with at length and two more we had to leave out because of length but to talk about the scientific method and how it works and in particular how the scientific method is important in this context of What we have dealt with for decades now with these cryptozoology hunters and so on and One of the first things you'll find of course is when you deal with it that they have the evidence Ranking all backwards right the evidence that they value the most and what most crypto hunters are crazy about is what they themselves Experienced personal experience or anecdotes of other people who claim to seem bigfoot and as those you know Come to set amazing meeting more often than not there's lots of problems with that which I'll mention a second So you'll see there on the slide It's better to think of things in terms of what scientists consider good evidence and not such good evidence The best possible course if it ever happens, which I'm not putting any money on in Vegas or anywhere else Is actual physical remains something that is more than just you know just the usual Bone a skeleton a tooth or even better still a carcass or a live animal all of which have never really have been obtained Then of course the sliding scale down goes really fast. So there are lots of videos There are lots of stuff out there But as all of you know in this business videos and photographs are extremely easy to fake it now Most kids can do Photoshop. We'll have to do themselves And then there's the crummiest evidence stuff that you can make up really easy as people have done for decades from You know footprints and all the rest which can be made fake so easily and then in my certainly in my personal view The worst possible evidence is personal experience Which is the reverse what cryptozoologists do because we all know if you've been to these meetings We are great at deceiving ourselves We have all sorts of ways in which our mind sees things that aren't there or plants things in there that we want to believe Are there we know not to trust eyewitness testimony the legal profession is gradually reaching that point where they too No longer take eyewitness testimony as much as they used to thanks to people like Elizabeth Loftus and others who have been at this meeting Before explaining how easily it can go wrong Many of you you seem the famous video that I didn't want to put the link in here for time reasons The famous gorilla and the basketball video where you're forced to concentrate on a team of two basketball teams Throwing a basketball back and forth and you're asked to count how many times the white shirt team Passes the basketball and if you do that properly and focus just on what they're doing You do not see a gorilla walk right through the shot. Okay, if you know that's coming, of course I've ruined it for you, but in any case, that's a classic example of attention Disorders that you can easily miss things Two examples that we put in the book here of classic cases where eyewitnesses turned to be very wrong in this case Tragically wrong a famous case in 2004 where hunter saw he was not hunting hunting hogs He saw something moving in the distance Someone called out hog. He took a shot at it It was actually the good toboggan cap his son was wearing and he killed his own son And then the famous suppose you remember this case from 2002 the famous DC sniper They were a police for given leads to look for a white van with white shooters And they actually they actually caught these guys several times in in various types of a roadblock to let him go Because they were looking for white Shooters and a white van and turned out to be two black guys in a blue blue sedan These are kinds of things where eyewitnesses just basically give us nothing to go on and then of course the long record of things like People say say they saw something and then when you actually have a way of checking it They put in memories that were not there Lots of ways in which as long as you watch, you know, what's happens here You'll see that we can easily Deceive ourselves and we often realize don't realize we're doing it Plus when you're dealing with say with an encrypted like the McKinley Bombay in Africa There's different standards of what's real or not real if you're in a different culture and for many cultures mythological Mythological features things they've seen in hallucinations are just real to them as what is what we would call real and we are Cannot necessarily take their idea reality face value when we're talking about ours So you have to be very careful. These things are very Slippery and yet this is what cryptozoologists dwell upon the largest point. I won't say much about the definition of cryptozoology It's basically yes, we're discovering new animals all the time, but they're usually fairly conventional animals They're a new species of cattle or a new species of peckery or a new species of monkey or bird Which most people wouldn't consider that startling the last really startling animals to be found were found better than a century ago The mountain gorilla in 1901 the Komodo dragon 1912 the copy in 191 There were things found since and like the Coopery and the Chaco and Peckery Nobody would have noticed they were different until zoologists actually looked So that one of the things you'll hear cryptozoologists say and this is a good point to discuss if you're interested Oh, well, you know like for example the seal the camp wasn't found until 1938 Well now the deep seas a different game right the deep sea has lots of things we haven't yet found But talking about the animals are normally part of cryptozoology They're air breathing either land creatures or everything sea creatures That's a totally different game all together and it's not fair comparison Plus the seal the can't do is extremely deep waters and impose as a world We're not a lot of fishing have been done until they were found Now one of the things that's really surprising and really interesting about this especially you follow it over time Which is one of the things that we do in our book is talk about how these Miss have grown over time and been propping it over time is that they tended to be much more believable and much more common In the old days and what we're seeing now is a sort of a law of diminishing returns We're getting fewer and fewer Sightings that make any sense and in many cases the sightings are dropping out quite a bit and What you can do this in zoology is a spacing like a law of diminishing turns How many new species expect to find given certain constraints so the plot you see there in the bottom of the screen Knowing that discovery curve as new species every year Which is that ascending curve you see in the left half of the plot those plots almost always taper off and come Much a flat slope at the very top because at some point you really pretty much reach somewhere Where there's not much the way of new things to discover and this has been done a number of different large animal groups Okay So and that's it seemed very effectively the special parts that Daniel worked on in our book We looked at the cultural fence how much cryptozoology is pretty much dictated by whatever Copycat phenomenon you want to dictate so Daniel shows very effectively that probably the modern version than Loch Ness monster was inspired by King Kong those you know the original original King Kong with that the Early stop motion animation there is a secreture in there that pretty much is a dead ringer for what Nessie became the year later And so there's a very strong line of evidence that Daniel points out nicely that King Pong probably spawned the Loch Ness monster Take that as your take home line Another example which we're not able to include in the book the legend the Chupacabra from Central and South America Latin America As Ben Radford is not here at this meeting as able to show it comes from one lady who watched the movie Species with Natasha Henstridge where she goes from being a beautiful woman to a strange creature and the monster Sill and that meeting looks just like her hallucination Chupacabra And then Chupacabra was spread all over the Latin world almost within a year or two Instantaneously and then especially after the famous Christina show Christina's like the Oprah this of the Latin world When it was on her show all of a sudden Chupacabra was in every country in Central and South America very non biological pattern Now something else that's commonly a part of the Cryptozoology mythology is this idea that there's so much left to find in the land There the world is unexplored and when you know the pioneers of cryptozoology I've been Sanderson who was a genuine zoologist did roam the jungles started their careers That might have been true But the world of inaccessible unknown regions is changing very rapidly. In fact, it's changed in a way. That's probably never conceivable If you've ever traveled the Pacific Northwest One of the things that strikes you and no matter how well the logging companies try to hide it Is that how much of the Pacific Northwest has been logged and logged and logged so on the bottom picture They're just a handful of these shots You can get from just low-angle aerial views of clear cutting the forest Nothing like it was when supposedly bigfoot was first roaming around in fact my co-author Daniel spent his childhood as a shepherd in these Clear-cut areas, so they're very common and it really represents very much less forest than most people give credit for or Think about what's going on now a satellite imagery you click on Google Earth And you could see better than any generation and ever in the past could see down to Resolution the size of a meter or so in most cases You could look for McKelley Mbembe or bigfoot yourself satellite Okay, it's that easy to see it from space and I show an image there from Google Earth I captured and the the references are in the book if you want to look it up yourself You can see elephants in space easily. Okay, and McKelley Mbembe is supposed to be bigger All right, so this is a kind of thing that the seldom mentioned it's actually quite easy now to really follow the world And you can do it from your laptop And the other point coming with this how much this world is actually seen by people who are not cryptozoologists Real biologists travel through Africa and they travel to the forest in North America all the time They really know their wild animals and they're not the ones who are big foot It's people who are amateurs about biology Wandering around and every strange sound they don't recognize his big foot And I love this little cartoon it just appeared online a week ago So I stuck it in the last minute You'll see the top cap from their percentage US population carrying cameras everywhere they go Every waking moment their lives and you see in the bottom and the last few years the very little fanfare We've closely settled the question of flying saucers leg monsters ghosts and big foot That's really to me one of the most powerful things There's a rumor going around. I don't know if it's true or not that Spilberg himself said he no longer believes in UFOs And it's because everyone has a cell camera Now I put into this book mostly my professional training as a biologist and a geologist I had to do both become a paleontologist and as biologists especially we know a lot of things about animal populations Maybe not known at the time of Ivan Sanderson or the early pioneers of cryptology I'm certainly known right now and it's inexcusable that people who actually think they're doing biology Don't know these things and shouldn't be paying attention to them But there are lots of things that you know occasionally hear these mentioned But they don't have it often get put together in a framework of what a field ecologist for example thinks of routinely trained to think of For example, first of all every cryptid is not a singleton right the Loch Ness monster Or there is not one big foot to live forever right they've got to be a population and the more you see of them The bigger the population has to be and that you never run into this thinking well Why are we never seeing too big foot together? Okay, you never run into the question. Well, why is there not more of these things the more there are the more likely We should be seeing good sightings and actual traces and the exact opposite is the case And in particular in biology is well known for land mammals especially larger animals require larger home range To sustain them as biologically organisms There's an actually clear cut formula there which I put on the screen if you're interested in the math of it Very straightforward a relationship can body size and how much you can how many animals they can sustain in a given area And you do that calculation the range area especially things about Kelly Mbembe and Loch Ness monster is not big enough To sustain a population and what Kelly Mbembe are Loch Ness monster Okay, and depending on how many big foot you expect to be out there in every state the union has one about once a month You pretty much can't make that sense either and most of the lakes in which the lake monsters live actually not big enough to support a lake monster Now as a geologist also in my training there are many geologic constraints and one in particular It's really important for all the lake monsters not just that Ness monster But also like Champlain monster champi and look there are many of them as you know But the thing it's almost always glossed over or just mentioned briefly and then never really thought about Every single one of those lakes was under a mile of ice 12,000 years ago and there are 24 Separate glaciation's the last two and a half million years that have covered those lakes repeatedly And we're talking about a thickness of ice similar to what's on top of Greenland right now So you have to do some very strange supernatural biology to get organisms in those lakes once the ice melts back None of those lakes by the way have an outlet to the ocean So unless there are quite a creatures that can crawl across enormous distances of land to somehow end up in the lake That pretty much rules out Nessie right there. Okay, along with champ and all the rest Simply cannot get those guys out there unless of course you want your animal frozen nice and then you're talking about sci-fi Which you're pretty much talking about sci-fi anyway Anyway, and then as a paleontologist This is something I can speak to directly from my training sure the fossil eggs isn't perfect But for large animals the fossil record is excellent because large animals leave large bones and they're much more likely to be preserved So we can much more great Confidence say when you don't see a large bone of something It's almost certainly no longer existence at least in the area where we collect them and in particular case of say bigfoot Okay, we have an outstanding fossil record of Ice age and live post ice age mammals in North America Literally tens of thousands hundreds of thousands specimens of most species that live in North America gigantic collection I mean I record work at LeBrona Tarpaq alone where they have a close to three million bones Okay, we can be pretty confident even rare animals are sample and we do have a handful of rare ice age animals Not once do we get anything from bigfoot or any primate for that matter Anywhere and the last 45 million years in North America that I think is very strong negative evidence And this is true also in Africa and elsewhere There's excellent fossil records since for example in the case of McKinley by Bambi or the Pleasysaur that's opposed to the Loch Ness monster Excellent evidence of both those animals are no longer around after 65 million years from every continent the world and that's not We can have a negative evidence that's strong negative evidence So I've finished then with the point. Well, why should we take cryptology seriously here is where what Daniel I sort of differ a bit I really feared that it is a sort of gateway drug to bad thinking and critical Sloppiness and so on and it's a tip thinking and the lower right there of your lower left Your slide of the guys who now chase McKinley by Bambi some of those also chase Loch Ness monster and they're all creationists Okay The only ones really spending any money or any time anymore chasing the Loch Ness monster or we're killing by Bambi are Creationists, why do you think they would do this? This is very bizarre because they think that somehow if they find a dinosaur in the Congo all of evolution be overthrown Which shows you how little they know about evolution Okay, and if you ever saw the series of monster quest about kind of like Bambi where I was the token skeptic with three minutes of Time in an hour the entire rest of video is this guy William Gibbon and his colleagues Blundering around showing that any trained field biologist. They were incompetent Doing the exact worst possible way to find the animal they were looking for And you say well, yeah, they're my creationist But they only listen to their audience below right slide if you heard about it They're now pushing the idea of promoting the Loch Ness monster in Louisiana science education because that is part of the creation's agenda So there are consequences in my view. Thank you Thank you Don that was excellent I do want to take a moment because Karen wasn't able to be here to remind you that her book haunting America is available for e-download Excellent book as well. It's a it's an e-books was not as substantial as this but the content's great So please give that a shot So let's just start out our panel with a question that's kind of near and dear to my heart And I'm gonna address this to Daniel, but then we'll go across with all of these serious Potentially harmful things out there bad ideas bad pseudo science bad attempts at science that can harm people Why should skeptics be interested in in Bigfoot? What's the value of Bigfoot skepticism? I think there I think there are a number of answers to that One is pretty obvious That a lot of people believe in Bigfoot a lot of people believe in all of these creatures Believe in Bigfoot is in the US and Canadian population around 20% of the population That's a you know two or three percent of people who are definitely convinced and you know roughly 17% of people who Believe that it's very probably real That's a lot of people you know and When when you have an idea that is that prevalent in the population? I think it's worth the time of a few critical specialists to look at that question you know I Advocate for this kind of skepticism, but I don't I don't insist that every skeptic take up Bigfoot as their personal personal bugbear, you know It's a you know, it's just having a handful of specialists Ideally for each of these strange ideas these pseudoscientific or fringe science ideas We should have specialists in homeopathy and ufology and you know Monsterology and all kinds of nonsense ologies, you know, that's that's what I think we're doing here There's also the Creationist angle that was just mentioned You know like Mokaili and Bambi for example really is a creature of and for and by missionaries It that's that's really why the legend is exists and it's propagated at this point It's it's funded by fundamentalist creationists and it's pursued in the hope of bringing down bringing down evolution which as John mentioned is a forlorn hope you know as sharks and You know most of the creatures around don't Sharon you have anything to add In that there aren't there are so many people involved and if you're involved at all in the community You'd realize that many of these people are extremely serious and put an enormous amount of time and effort and sometimes money In into this hobby serious hobby that they have it could And it's interesting and it grabs the media attention these stories no matter how credible they are the media still loves to put them out there for me I Have been interested in cryptozoology since I was a kid And I think that another point to be made is that kids are interested in monsters And this is a good way to bring kids into the idea of skeptical thinking and critical thinking about is this real and I think a lot of us have done that with our own kids and Have had success in showing them how to think about this issue and the evidence that it that that is out there But I think that is if I may that is why so many junior skeptics start with a monster hook It's you know kids like monsters. It's a great Grown-ups. Yeah, I mean grown-ups like much, you know and and right now with bigfoot is huge right now He's really big He's all over television and The media just loves it and I think what it's portrayed search for bigfoot is portrayed as a scientific endeavor and A lot of this what this book is about shows that it's a really poor representation of how science works And it's being portrayed as science in these media TV shows like monster quest and finding bigfoot And it's just awful and I do have this Concern that kids or adults watching this on TV are thinking that's the way science works And it's just really bad. I think that hits on a meta issue that television shows in general Which purport to be scientific have the issue that all that's editorially controlled even if they have scientists in the Content generation that the editorial controls done by non-scientists If you've seen it on TV, it must be well, yeah I have really good friends who are very intelligent who believe that ghost hunters is a scientific show or mermaids. Yes Just last month don't lose track of mermaids. That's right Yeah, I'll amplify what they both said but a different thing It's obvious is that the way the media is now fractured you have this giant race of unfiltered news 24-7 of our thousands of different channels and every possible electronic device You own seems to be a filter for news and so the sad part is if it bleeds it leads It's always been a standard of journalism Bigfoot or any monster captures media attention captures an audience and the challenge is Hopefully that one or more of us who are the other side will eventually get our voice heard So that these guys will at least get you know the token skeptic my three minutes in an hour program is better than we usually get But at least that's the part of the job. We've hopefully in position to do Because otherwise as Sharon said it basically creates a false notion of how science works in her words It's science see you know they imitate the science trappings without actually really doing the method of science And we need to get the public in general more aware of what real scientists do and how it doesn't resemble their stuff at all You know I'm Soft on monsters to you honestly because I come from monsters, you know, I I love this stuff as a kid I love it now You know for me, it's just a continuation of my childhood love of paranormal mysteries the skeptical work I do is just the same thing a little bit better You know, I'm just continuing the same work. It can have a cost people do get killed Doing these kind of monster monster pursuits case recently where someone was run over in the Execution of a Bigfoot hoax There is a human cost sometimes lives are destroyed In the you know in the vain vain pursuit of these will of the wisp kind of legends But even if there were no cost these would still be interesting things to study, you know, these are These paranormal ideas have shaped our culture Western culture has been shaped by UFOs and Bigfoot and and and these are ideas that Nonetheless have been largely neglected by other scholarships. So it falls on us to do that work. I think that's useful I agree. I think also from my own perspective that that the world of Cryptozoology and paranormal investigation is the world of belief read small I mean each of these beliefs you'll see the same sort of techniques used To defend them whether success or unsuccessfully and successfully unsuccessfully In religious approaches or paranormal approaches or cryptozoological, which theoretically shouldn't be paranormal but Every one of the audience has the opportunity to get on to the internet and Argue for or against any particular claim that comes out So I guess a question I have is how should we comport ourselves as skeptics? When engaging with people who believe these things and I'm going to address that to Sharon first Yeah Yeah, I mean my philosophy is that I don't want to disparage people's experiences and their beliefs They have these experiences and they're interpreting them in terms of say a Bigfoot encounter they've had a scary experience out in their backyard or out in the out in the woods or camping and Because of the cultural aspect they interpret it in terms of this monster and I Can't change their interpretation and I wasn't there to have their experience either But they were obviously extremely affected by it and rather scared and they don't know what to think about it most of the time So I try to be really sympathetic to their beliefs as I talked about it in my talk on Friday I try to be that honest broker and give them some ideas about what could could be an alternative you're dealing with with a Belief that's so strong that you're not going to be able to undo that with just your commentary, but I try to be fair People know me as the skeptic, but they also know that I'm not going to call them crazy I'm not going to say that they're lying because I don't think either one of those things I think they've had a personal experience that they've interpreted in their own way So I'm trying to be sympathetic to that doesn't always work There are nasty Believers just as much as there are nasty debunking skeptics who are you know will will brush people off So you're going to have those extremes in any of the population, but I just try to try to be in the middle It doesn't always work. I understand Dan do you have anything to say about Tom? This is a topic I just quite often and my approach is just to be professional at all costs at all times and and empathetic particularly because as Sharon just mentioned a Lot of the time People people believe Sagan said People are not stupid. They believe things for reasons and and that's true People don't just you know mostly just pick things out of the air They've had things that shape these beliefs in their lives and an eviscerate personal experience is very compelling You know if you say big foot you will believe in big foot and And that will that would convince you in this room You know you are unlikely to see big foot because you are not set up that way, but many people are and Yeah, it's very hard to argue with that kind of thing and and You know in a way, I don't really have a right to you know, I I was not there. I did not see what you saw so I try and approach those conversations with Transparency about the limits of my knowledge involving the case we're discussing Don because you actually engage with these people not just online, but in real life Yeah, every once in a while I've battled creation is far longer and there's a lot of similarities. In fact, we saw the large something he's overlapping populations And in both cases you really aren't going to make a lot of headway being the hardcore skeptic You know these people have a deep set need to believe something And this is either a directly religious belief where it's a quasi religious belief But it's not something that the reason will easily dissuade them up So the best you can do is as they would we have both said already is be professional be clear You know point to resources where they can see the other side Try to explain why scientists in this case don't take certain cryptids very seriously And you really don't have much power beyond that I mean, you know, we're not going to convert the whole world and that's a Pipe tree and we just do the best we can I do have some success in like asking those questions just that just questioning what these Just questioning let's say a big-foot experts who people who are blogging or writing on the topic And you just ask them these basic questions like you could do in any paranormal Setting just asking them those questions is very revealing because often they don't have good answers And you're always thinking about the people on the outside who are just watching and maybe have not made up their mind yet So you're doing that for them as well. I think in my experience the people who have got a personal Experience having seen something that they can't explain or that they feel was probably a little big But is a much different from someone like myself who hasn't but has just a general curiosity About the topic so that it's it's quite it's quite different the engagement process I suppose this is an analysis to someone who's experienced a miracle versus people who've heard about a miracle And I think the parallels between religiosity and cryptozoology In the way that the the believers believe is The same I don't really know how to put it Matt Crowley our friend and colleague Says that many big-footers treated as a religion and I think the indignation that that you receive online when you engage with these folks if Seems disproportionate for how serious the claim would be outside of the context of the conversation So and I think a lot that comes from that that kind of a situation So this under stream of cryptozoology and creation isn't being mixed together I was aware of it before I started monster talk But I it just keeps coming up again and again and again So I was going to ask, you know Why won't McKelley Mbembe disprove evolution, but I'm going to change that question and I'm going to say what cryptid Would best disprove evolution? Don okay There's a famous quote I think it was to hall day or someone saying, you know, what kind of thing would disprove evolution the fossil record and There's something the answer along like a fossil horse in the Cambrian It's not that animals could live, you know past and we think they're extinct that we know that does happen Just makes us twist our story a little differently when you discover they did not in fact were extinct but what really is crucial to our understanding of evolution and our Confidence that it's real is that the fossil record has a very clear-cut sequence sequence of animals through time and If there were something really remarkable that was unquestionably, you know in place Not something that accidentally be introduced or some kind of hoax That would be indeed a true falsification of at least part of our understanding of evolution. That's not what they're talking about here So you're saying mermaids, right? They violate all sorts of biological I would also add a Good example a recent example is is the catch of interpretation of the DNA. I was actually about to ask you about that Okay, the the interpretation of the DNA You should you should have an animal that has a that fits into our our our existing Scheme of things what what DNA is this should we? So recently I think that there's always been an issue of anecdotal evidence versus hard scientifically in evaluatable evidence In cryptozoology and so up until this recent DNA study hair samples And prints are really the best evidence that's been available and some grainy photographs in one amazingly confusing movie But this DNA study had been there were rumors that someone had DNA and they were going to be doing a real scientific study Sharon, how did that play out? Oh? gosh not very well a Good example of how not to do science and what science is not I think She did a veterinarian dr. Melba Ketchum She did collect many samples from across the country as they were sent to her and she ran them through a DNA test and The results are just it's way too long a story to talk about some I'm not going to really talk about details but the end result is that she came out with a result that showed that Bigfoot would be a hybrid between a some ancestral primate unknown, I guess proto bigfoot whatever and then a Female human The DNA ended up looking like bits and pieces of different DNA all mixed together panda awesome all sorts of animals and bits of you know human off the the certain chromosome and It's exactly what you would expect if it was a mixture of pieces of DNA that had been degraded out in the environment Her interpretation was that it's a whole new animal. It's a whole new thing However, it you if you find a whole new animal It should fit into the pattern of evolution that we already know about it should fit into the DNA Database in a way that makes sense. This did not in any way. You're saying primates don't become marsupials later If I'm understanding you right, is that right? Yes, so they bigfoot do fall asleep if you scare them Rather the ponds, okay, okay. I got it. All right So again that without it eventually came out that she made me believe that Bigfoot are You know the angels that worse. She's very religious again. We've got this religious theme going through this conversation and It just gets weird and it just doesn't it just doesn't fit into what we know it did play out It was a big disappointment. I think for everyone who wanted to see DNA evidence thoroughly evaluated. Although there is another DNA study going on that's still During it's been in process right, right. That's Todd Sykes. He's he's working on that Working in the UK collecting samples from all across the world I think yeah, and he is he actually does have a bit more credibility to do such a study than Dr. Ketchum. I think he has a good reputation. I think it'll be interesting to see how this plays out as a comparison So I'm anxious to hear the results to that So Can crypto zoology be science? Yeah, this is something Daniel and I both put in at length in the final chapter of the book The problem is is that crypto zoology is almost always come from amateur, you know interests know Enthusiasts, which is not bad because amateurs do contribute to many areas of science But to do science right there is a scientific method And then one of the key things in scientific method is we try to be very careful about things like data collection About how we analyze samples If possible, you know running a third sample or a blind or something like that So you don't know what you're doing, which of course Ketchum didn't do And try as best you can not to fool yourself. I guess is the famous quotation from from Richard Feynman these people of course want to believe anything that they find that confirms their viewpoint of course not anything else and The scientists is not in that game the scientist has to face the evidence and if it goes against what he or she already thinks Honest scientist has got to change their mind Not excited on a scientist has to recognize that something is not what they thought it was and that's one of the first places We see this failure of scientific method. It doesn't matter what evidence is out there It will always fit their viewpoint as big boot is real or whatever And then there's a whole series of other things basic to science but the biggest problem and Daniel pointed out again and again is There's a tendency in the crypto literature to just pile on story after story after story with no real attempt to weed out What's good and what's bad even when they themselves have a committed. Okay? Well, this study is obviously a hoax It shows up again in the next paper as if they never learned anything and this is the same way the gracious are They won't correct mistakes. That's a serious issue scientists are not allowed to get away with that All the day There is this creationist thread that runs through cryptozoology, which we discussed in the book which is otherwise not discussed very much in the literature and That that is part of the kind of the fabric of cryptozoology, but one of the things that makes cryptozoology fun Is that it it can be scientific if you know it? The basic project of cryptozoology is you know it Goes with it goes with the ethos of science. They're trying to find evidence you don't have to You know, you don't have to overturn the laws of physics for Bigfoot to be real You just have to find Bigfoot and you know, and you can do that using ordinary kind of scientific means, you know Big net, maybe So yeah, it is fun But it's also Extremely primitive and likely to remain that way because it's not fruitful. So it doesn't it doesn't really invite That much serious scientific interest it did previously, you know There has been a kind of scientific history of monstrology In the 19th century, especially there was very serious interest in sea serpents, which we discussed in the book But because it doesn't go anywhere You know, it is left largely in the hands of amateurs and they as dawn mentioned have the critical problem of Never ever ever Cutting the bad apples out of their well Bigfooters love to talk about the the Bigfoot database the sighting database Go to the primary evidence. They they're always shouting at the skeptics, but you know, it's not a database It's just a big messy pile and and everybody knows that there's a ton of hoaxes in there a lot of complete baloney And if you press if you press cryptozoologists on this, they will sometimes admit that as many as 90% And you know you have all just it will say the same thing about their database as many as 90% of the the cases the sighting cases and Footprint cases are baloney But they don't know which ones and the literature never makes any effort to find out, you know, it just it just keeps piling and So as long as that's true cryptozoology will never Never advance as a scientific pursuit although it could I studied amateur paranormal investigators and in that group I included cryptozoologist along with ghost hunters and UFO chasers and I Asked what I did was I looked at see how they used the word science in their portrayal and their methodology and it was very poor They used it. They used it about more than half the time in my survey But the way they used it was Incorrect or very weak or as Susan Hack talked about yesterday as an honorific way of making it sound good and One thing I noticed was that not many of the more scientists are had scientific training computer science doesn't count Sorry guys But they that's that. Oh, yes, I have computer science them's fighting words I'm just being I'm just being I'm just clarifying and One thing I noticed in the way that they they approached this is that The approach was wrong. The question maybe is not about cryptozoology about a cryptid. It's What happened if anything in this situation where somebody says they had this experience? So the paranormal investigators of whatever type go into these investigations thinking I'm going to find evidence for X paranormal cryptid whatever no the question is what if anything happened here? And they start off immediately by narrowing their options and going down that path, which is the wrong path Yeah, you know, you go to Ben Radford's book and scientific paranormal Investigations and it shows you that that's not the way you should approach these problems if you really want the answer And so I get this feeling that the cryptozoologists as well as the ghost hunters Are particularly bad at this are looking for a particular answer. It's sham inquiry It's it's putting the answer before the evidence and looking for the evidence to fit the answer Well, you know in astronomy, there's a really robust body of amateur astronomers who contribute to the science So why aren't there amateur naturalists who are working in cryptozoology and contributing to the body of work or wait? Are there aren't you one? I suppose I am yeah Except he hasn't traveled the woods anymore looking for but seriously. Yeah, it just seems like there's there's a lot of there's no pressure for an improvement in the body of written work anyway, well, I mean with You know in in fields where there is a structure of like a core of professional academics and then you know a larger body of serious amateur practitioners There is a core of academics and Cryptozoology largely doesn't have that. I mean it has occasionally invited Interest as occasionally attracted interest from individual academics who have some kind of relevant training But but there is no community Serious scientists anybody And I mean there's not even a well-policed guidance on how to collect evidence safely there's nothing They had that at one time too as Daniel mentioned You know people like Roy Mackle and so on were actual PhDs in fields sort of cryptozoology but Roy Mackle was a microbiologist and that he was spending all his time Chelsea McGill and McGenby and and Plays his horse and locked nests, which are not the same thing. Okay a biology degree is not a universal passport to do anything and That was a problem. They had academics with a handful of them with really inappropriate training Which made them just amateurs effectively and most of that core of the people who used to take cryptology seriously One of the professionals is all passed on now their journal has gone extinct. It's almost a hundred percent amateurs now I think I should take a moment here to plug Brian Regal's book because it ties into the topic really well So if you get a chance to look at Brian Regal's book on at the crack pots Eggheads and crackpots If you look for eggheads and crackpots Brian Regal, you'll find it. It's a great Really detailed overview. I think this book has more citations though He has a lot of citations so but you you've got him beaten sighs anyway So that was one of the things that bug me you talk about stories after stories You go to the popular cryptozoology literature like the stuff that's found in the library for like middle school kids And you just pick it up and it's the same recycled stories And there isn't one citation in the whole no no no and it's occurred another problem is is you've alluded to Things that have already been thoroughly just proven continued to be promoted as the real and that's we a monster tuck We call it the echo chamber paranormal literature, but it's true for cryptozoology as well and true creationism to their arguments Never changed after 50 years So and I think one of the best things about science is you continuously try to find out what's wrong and then remove that from the body So yeah, that's a real issue with the whole topic, but hopefully you'll listen to monster talk and find out what's going on next We have time for some questions. Sure. So what do I need to do to make that happen George? A little bit of time a little bit of time let's form a line please if we could real quick Number one right here. Here we go Hi Sharon, hi guys They know but maybe not everyone knows that I belong to a big-foot hunting group called the Bigfoot Club And I'd like to thank finding Bigfoot because now they think they need a skeptic And the fact that I'm a girl helps But what I found is that? We'll come up with ideas like we spent all winter looking for big footprints in the snow Very methodically and I helped them set this up And I was the only one that found some weird footprints, which disappointed them But what we don't take into account is how much of a social group it is how much fun we have Saying goodbye to our spouses They're gonna go camp in the woods and have fun and to give that up It would be very very difficult Yeah, and that's what I found is that the social atmosphere is so important So I just wanted I wanted to join some paranormal investigation groups, but they wouldn't have me Yeah, the community aspect is a big part of it the same reason a lot of churches, you know Hold their people that's a community more than the dogma. It's about your friends Even if there aren't people Scientific people going out and look looking for your particular Cryptozoids Wouldn't people like birders who are out doing surveys of birds if they saw something that looked like a big foot? Wouldn't they report it to somebody? Wouldn't the loggers I realize they're not scientific But have any loggers ever reported that while they're clear-cutting that they saw something big running away Daniels the heart or he should tell us Well, I mean, yeah, that goes to my personal history I grew up on clear-cuts in British Columbia and I spent my first career as a shepherd Working on clear-cuts again far out in the wilderness up along the BC side of the Alaska Panhandle We saw some pseudo-big-foot Those are generally stumps They have a they have an aqueous counterpart to don't they We have people don't realize how well traveled those areas are I mean the entire You know the the forest of North America is a gridded up commodity It has been logged and re-logged and re-logged and regrown and regrown and regrown the whole thing is is Civilized, you know, there's wilderness out there, but there were also people out there So, yeah, you would expect a much more robust I wanted to comment on that, too There's a huge body of what should have been evidence that hasn't really been studied very much by big-footers. I don't think but that's Grizzly bearer researchers have hair traps all over the Pacific Northwest and have been doing surveys and studies on those for years And they've never reported funny strange, you know Unrecognizable hairs that I'm aware of and I've been trying to find out so There's this kind of basic paradox in cryptozoology that These these cryptids seem like plausible Possibilities because many people see them, but because many people see them we should have concrete evidence and there's just no getting around that Tension it's a problem From a Psychiatrist point of view a vexing question that pervades just about every topic of this entire meeting is What are the boundaries between delusion and mere credulity or suggest Suggestibility I Could suggest many answers to that question, but I'm much more interested in knowing the panel's point of view If someone else says it it's probably delusion, but if I say it Well, and that's that's part of what science is about I mean an individual scientist can believe all sorts of things and there are many Classical cases of individual scientists going off the deep end with some belief system But in scientific community the point is we are self-checking. We have peer review We have many other ways in which you case you have a solid case more than one person should be able to see it And so usually if there's no evidence beyond the individual claims to see something It's mostly by peer review that weeds it out and that's pretty much where we take that Oh, and also that I would say there's a really like 3D markations within cryptozoology that I'm aware of and one is They're the natural reality ones, you know biology you inspire people the paranormal lists and then the creationists and None of those three really like to get along with each other. They're all interested in the same topic So that's that's a true division within the groups. Oh, yeah, I wrote about that. It's called supernatural creep when Their idea of Bigfoot They can't think of anything natural that would account for certain things like why he just Disappears although delusion does yeah, and they end up moving towards supernatural Explanations exactly, so there's this horrible thing. We got time for one more question. Okay How come most of the cryptids tend to be huge monsters creatures rather than small things like six-legged frogs Which would be much more justifiable in terms of even existing. What is it about the psychology of having these monsters creatures? Well, they're that much awesomer And They also tend to be like hybrids Like that, you know, they have a head of a horse and a body of a kangaroo and a tail of a dragon So they have all these hybrid characteristics, which also goes against evolution doesn't make any sense No, no genetic mechanism whatsoever. Yeah, well, and I think I think even before the formal study of If it is formal of cryptozoology the the a lot of these signings fit into the folklore and our folklore is full of Spectacular monsters and giants in every culture as far as I can tell so I think but there's even Thousands of years ago the story of the six-legged toe was not very popular Going going back to the previous question about belief, you know, there is quite a literature within skepticism And of course a larger literature within wider psychology about why people believe things My boss at skeptic magazine Michael Shermer has spent a lot of his career working on this question of why people believe weird things And in fact, why people believe anything? for myself, you know, I Know sheep and art and monsters Yeah And I can I can best speak to why I believed in monsters and in fact most of it I believed in most paranormal things and that's because they really seem legit You know as a you if you just walk in off the street They sound pretty good and and that's that's why I believed it I think they're hooked in my in my family history as well because my parents saw a cryptic called Called Cadrosaurus which is the local Pacific Northwest iteration of the great great sea serpent of the North Atlantic So that that was a that was pretty compelling. I think George is about to shake us off the stage So sure Dan Sharon Don. Thank you so much for being here. Please buy a copy Thank you so much