Summary: Destination Truth

Words: 916
Pages: 4

In early 2009, the TV show Destination Truth, starring Josh Gates, brought a hair sample back from Bhutan. In May of 2009, the producers of the show chose Dr. Melba Ketchum of DNA Diagnostics to perform DNA analysis.

Dr. Ketchum did not believe that the creature known as Bigfoot existed, but she agreed to run the analysis anyway. What she found astounded her. The mtDNA tested human, but the hair was not human. When Dr. Ketchum compared the sequence to Genbank (Genbank is a database of millions of DNA profiles both animal and human - http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/genbank/) she could not find a match.

Below is the transcript from the interview of Dr. Ketchum by Josh Gates that aired on November 5th, 2009:

Dr. Ketchum: I didn't think we would have anything to talk about here, to be honest. I was just going to rule out 'yeti' and be done with it. I submitted the sequence that we obtained from this hair sample to a large international database that scientists use to deposit their sequence data. Well, at first I was very skeptical,
…show more content…
Dr. Ketchum: The hair, visually, is not human. It's courser than horse tail hair.

Gates: (voiceover) what she told me next seemed
…show more content…
I really didn't believe that they existed and thought I would just disprove it and go along my merry way. I was totally oblivious to what was headed my way with this. It also never occurred to me how difficult "proof" would be and how long it would take. We had tested "alleged" Sasquatch samples since 1995 for species ID, but they had only tested as common animals until early 2009. Even then, I didn't trust my results as there wasn't enough DNA to continue with those samples. So, I just wasn't expecting this nor did I think about the implications since I didn't believe in