The bigger the Bigfoot claim, the bigger the need for evidence

 Forget blurry pictures and casts of big foot-prints. A Texas veterinarian, Dr Melba Ketchum, and her collaborators have published an article, in a peer-reviewed scientific journal, proving the existence of Bigfoot.

It's not the first peer-reviewed Bigfoot DNA paper. In 2004 an international team of geneticists, led by Michel Milinkovitch, published an analysis of "clearly identified … [yeti] hair". They concluded the yeti, though genetically closer to ungulates, looks remarkably similar to primates.

A similar tongue-in-cheek paper, authored by Dave Coltman and Corey Davis from the University of Alberta, was published in a 2006 issue of TRENDS in Ecology and Evolution. And similar to the Milinkovitch paper the identification of the sample was not in question:

"In July 2005, nine residents of Teslin, Yukon, witnessed through a kitchen window a large bipedal animal moving through the brush. The next morning, they collected a tuft of coarse, dark hair and also observed a footprint measuring 43 cm in length and 11.5 cm in width."

Coltman and Davis concluded that though Bigfoot, from eyewitness accounts, looked like Harry Henderson, genetically it was more closely related to bison. Of course, there is another explanation – the eyewitness account could have been wrong.

The problem with Ketchum's paper? It's not tongue-in-cheek. The authors are claiming to have sequenced not one but three Bigfoot genomes, concluding Bigfoot is a human hybrid. They even include HD footage of a sleeping Bigfoot (see below):