Interviewed on The Naked Scientist Podcast: 8/18/08, 38:53 in
http://www.thenakedscientists.com/HTML/con.../interview/967/

“The day somebody comes in to a major university and throws a sasquatch carcass on the dissecting table it’s all over…the crackpots are out and the eggheads take over.”

In regards to his recent article in Endeavor magazine

pdf link:
http://www.kean.edu/~bregal/docs/Bigfoot%2...e.Endeavour.pdf
from the author’s website:
http://www.kean.edu/~bregal/

“The common narrative for discoveries of Sasquatch evidence was that amateurs claimed support for the beast’s existence only to be dismissed by scientists interpreting the same evidence as a hoax or a misidentification. At Bossburg, the exact opposite occurred.”

A very good article & some positive attention for the search for sasquatch in a scholarly journal. While Regal remains agnostic on the subject he draws parallels to other accepted fields of science that depended on amateurs in their beginnings.

hey everyone wow very interesting great article indeedy

Excellent articles. However, amateurs still have important roles to play in making discoveries in science. For example, comet Hale-Bopp was discovered by amateurs, and so have many dinosaur fossils and new species. This is because scientists generally are specialized in one area of expertise and spend a lot of their time in labs or museums studying finds already on the "lab bench," teaching, writing, etc. They have careers to protect and their work is subjected to peer review which can be very narrow in scope. Amateurs are not limited by such things. They are the ones that have the time to go looking for things, or they stumble across something interesting and have the knowledge and intelligence to realize they've found something important. However, recognition and validation of their work entails bringing it to the attention of the specialists in the field of study. For example, if I (a Biologist not employed in the field) should stumble on a bigfoot carcass while I am spending some free time as a volunteer doing a species inventory in a remote Ecological Reserve here in Western Canada, I would most likely shoot off an email to Jeff Meldrum to come and have a look--or perhaps email someone from UBC's Anthropology department, if they would be open minded enough to come see. They would probably take it from there, and any paper published would be by them and the credit of the discovery go to them. They would be responsible for stretching the current theories and paradigms of their area of science to encompass the new discovery, and probably would name it as well. My name might fade into obscurity, unless they chose to be generous and shared the limelight.

At the beginning of the first article the author states:

I started by asking him what first got him interested in these strange creatures and the strange people that study them

Thanks alot that makes me feel real good about myself.

The thing that’s interesting about the amateurs is that they tend to ignore what the mainstream scientists tell them.

It's a good thing that never happens on this forum!

I think this guy is probably as interested in entertaining as much as he is interested in educating. That is normally a good thing - but sometimes characterizations can be cruel if they are made for laughs.

Besides - he's just a Historian fer cryin' out loud. Pfffft!