Hell hath no fury like a Melbite scorned

Long-time friend of the show, talented illustrator of our fantastic cover art, and guest from BFS 037 Daniel Falconer said this on our Facebook page in response to our posts on the sudden media blitz conducted by Melba Ketchum (emphasis mine):

I honestly get the impression Melba thinks she’s fighting the good fight. I don’t think, as some do, that she is trying to scam anyone, nor am I happy to see her being ridiculed. The destructiveness of this all is the worst part. She is just trying to prove what she believes she already knows. But, the study doesn’t do that. What she calls results, other scientists call errors, and her conclusions just make no sense. I don’t for one minute buy the ridiculous notion that other scientists are trying to discredit her for reasons of jealousy or some other agenda. That’s fantasy land. Folks like Disotell would like nothing better than to be part of a discovery as monumental as ultimate proof of bigfoot, but this study doesn’t provide that. It’s flawed, which is why it didn’t pass peer review and why every other scientist with relevant expertise who has looked at it since it was published has called out the same problems. There’s no conspiracy here, just a big mistake that is being compounded with every new piece of publicity it gets. Meanwhile the whole field looks even more foolish.

Exactly right (except for the scam part — the jury’s still out on that one, IMO). The Melbites out there are defending her by attacking the entire world around them. It’s the Galileo Effect. It’s because she’s a woman in a man’s field. It’s because we’re all truth-fearing luddites. Because because because.

No. It’s because her science sucked. Period. End of line.

I would have loved for her to have proven the existence of bigfoot (as would people like Disotell, as Daniel points out). Truly. If you go back and listen to the shows we did early on, we totally gave her the benefit of the doubt in all this. But she failed. Terribly. And now, she’s compounding the failure by making herself known to the muggles of the non-bigfooting world and, by association, making us all look like idiots. She’s gone from an entertaining sideshow to a liability for those of us who want to be taken seriously (getting in line, to be fair, with a long cadre of bad actors who came before her).

Note that I’m setting aside the totally absurd ill-fitting Wookie costume she claims to be a video of a real sasquatch. On the merits of her argument, she’s a loser. The Wookie thing only seals her sad fate.

I think Willy Wonka said it best…