Here is the transcript of Josh Gates' brief interview with Dr. Melba Ketchum, a forensic analyst with DNA Diagnostics, Inc., from the 2009 episode of Destination Truth:

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, because we've had these things come into our lab in the past, and they never panned out to be anything interesting.  However, this sample did test very clearly on the human panel of markers.  That makes it a primate and it makes it a large primate.

Gates:  And how are we sure that it isn't just human contamination or that it's just DNA from human hair?

Dr. Ketchum:  The hair, visually, is not human.  It's courser than horse tail hair. 

Gates: (voiceover) what she told me next seemed unbelievable.

Dr. Ketchum:  Initial searches indicate that it's an unknown sequence.  There are literally millions of sequences in this database.  And we're really shocked that it didn't match any of the species exactly in the database.

Gates:  What would be required in order for us to say, from a DNA standpoint, the yeti is a real animal.

Dr. Ketchum:  If we're going to prove that there potentially is a new species, with this first hair sample, we really need more hair samples like it.  And once you establish there is a group of animals, that will go a long ways towards proving that there is a new species indeed.

Assuming there is no chicanery involved (and with TV, how can you ever be sure?) this has to be considered a major find.  And it gives us good reason to go back and find the results that we've all heard of before, of those hairs that come back "unknown primate."  If these hairs can be located and tested again, they might show a familial resemblance with the hairs Destination Truth found.  And I'd find that pretty significant.

Josh Gates - Dr. Melba Ketchum - May, 2009 aired on Novenber 5, 2009


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