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May 12, 2009 8:32 AM

Over on NBA, Cliff has a post about a knuckle print cast he has in his collection. And, in case you missed it, here’s a page on his website devoted to his cast collection too.

I think we probably don’t talk enough about this kind of evidence. One reason for that is it’s dang hard to come by, especially in my research area. But these are pieces of real, tangible evidence that something strange is going on out there. Which makes me think about the issues involved in bigfoot casts.

DERMAL RIDGES

Jimmy Chilcutt just happened to be at the right place at the right time. He had begun taking the prints of primates because he believed that he might be able to derive methods of getting more information out of human fingerprints if he understood them better. Then he saw Jeff Meldrum talking about a cast on TV. Intrigued, he contacted Meldrum and set up a meeting.

A skeptical Chilcutt arrived in Pocatello, Idaho, in April, 2000 and began studying Meldrum’s collection. He first examined the casting Meldrum had shown on TV and quickly determined it to be a fake. The toeprints were actually human fingerprints. Meldrum turned him loose on the entire collection. The print ridges on the bottoms of five castings — which were taken at different times and locations — flowed lengthwise along the foot, unlike human prints, which flow from side to side, he said. “No way do human footprints do that — never, ever. The skeptic in me had to believe that all of the prints were from the same species of animal,” Chilcutt said. “I believe that this is an animal in the Pacific Northwest that we have never documented.”

I know that Matt Crowly has tried to prove that the dermal ridges people find on casts are artifacts of the casting process. (There is even a Skeptical Enquirer article about him and his work.) The approbation of the Skeptical Enquirer notwithstanding, my impression from reading his site is that it has not always been easy for him to find processes that will create artifacts. I remember reading that one method he tried employed a very specific dish soap in his casting material. I suppose it’s useful to prove that artifacts can occur, but if you have to get everything just right.. How often are researchers in the field going to pour casts under such “goldilocks” conditions?

Melissa Hovey has challenged Crowley on his findings, too. (Here is a page linking her articles about casting and artifacts.) She tries to replicate them and finds that she can’t do it very easily. She has some specific criticisms about Crowley’s methods, too.

Matt Crowley did some early tests with Plaster of Paris, but he quickly moved on to Hydrocal and Ultracal. I have been a bit frustrated by this, as the initial test is about the Onion Mountain cast. I asked a number of people if they knew exactly what casting cement, the Onion Mountain cast was made with, and no one could say for sure, so I recently fired off an email to the man who would know – John Green, and he did, in fact, state the Onion Mountain cast was made with Plaster of Paris. It’s my opinion if you are working to prove or disprove something – you should be as “true” to the original work as possible.

Both these criticisms — that Crowley puts forward casts that need unusual methods to create, and that he isn’t careful to use the same materials in his tests as were used in the original casts — point to the same problem. He’s not being very scientific in his approach. Which is not to say it isn’t useful to know that artifacts can be created that look like dermal ridges, but it would’t pay to over-interpret what he presents, because it seems he does not understand some of the boundaries of scientific inquiry. (He’s an artist, by his own admission, and while artists are good at creating things, they are not necessarily so good at figuring out how a thing was made with scientific precision.) What this situation needs is an impartial scientific survey undertaken by several independent researchers using strict controls. (But, hey, this is bigfoot research — good luck with that!)

HOAXING

Paul Freeman made some incredible casts (including the knuckle cast linked above)but there were suspicions that he hoaxed some of his data. I have had to contend with this problem myself. A research associate faked a hand print and probablyfaked a set of tracks in snow. There is no doubt that hoaxing of tracks, and therefore the discrediting of any casts made from those tracks, is a problem for bigfoot researchers, and the cast that Cliff pionted us to is no exception. It is a beautiful specimen, and some bigfoot believing scientists do back it, but the evidence that Freeman hoaxed is not thin. What makes those scientists back these casts, coincidentally, are the dermal ridges so beautifully reproduced (or, following Crowley, produced) within them. And I’ve heard people say that Freeman’s admission of faking tracks, on a Good Morning America show in 1987, concerned making tracks to see how they were formed in certain soils and how they would weather. (You will see Michael Dennet try to put this to rest in his obituary, yet it does not seem that what Freeman said on camera necessarily contradicts what was said later.) But it has to be said — Freeman collected an awful lot of evidence. Much more than one would think possible.

There’s much more that could be said about casts and casting. What other issues come to mind when you look at that cast over at Cliff’s site?

 

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