Dave: I know you have challenged Jimmy Chilcutt’s findings. Are there really such things as dermal ridges?

Matt: Oh, of course. All primates as well as the koala bear have dermal ridges on the hands and feet. It is a reasonable inference that the Sasquatch is a primate, and therefore a reasonable inference that the Sasquatch has dermal ridges on its hands and feet.

Dave: Have you ever gone out in the field looking for bigfoot?

Matt: Sort of! My girlfriend Dana and I hiked into, and spent the night in, Ape Canyon a few years ago. But no, frankly my interests lie in the analysis of evidence. I’d like to get out into the deep forests of Western Washington, but I build lamps for a living and I sell them at a Sunday market here in Seattle. Thus “getting away for a weekend” is a bit of a problem. The good news is that I’m lucky enough to know Rick Noll and Owen Caddy, so I might be able to tag along with them some time.

Dave: So what are the odds that a bipedal primate actually exists in North America in your opinion?

Matt: Wow! I’m not sure I want to touch that one with the proverbial 10 foot pole! And here is the reason why; the crux of the advocate vs. skeptic arguments in my opinion come down to “should” arguments rather than “is” arguments. For example, we have the “is” state of affairs in that there is no body to examine. From there, we get the “should” arguments of the advocates and the skeptics. For the skeptics, we should have a body by now, due to roads, rifles and thousands of years of man’s occupation of the North American continent. For the advocates, the lack of a body is what we should expect, being that the population of the species is low, soil conditions not conducive to fossilization, and quick and thorough disarticulation of carcasses by predators.

My point being that a “should be” argument is much more difficult to assess than an “is” argument. So, my cop-out answer to your question is “low but possible”….

Dave: Getting back to your work in the basement, Jimmy Chilcutt has been considered up to this point the gold standard of footprint investigation. What areas of his work are you challenging and why?

Matt: Well, my intention at the start was not to challenge his work at all, it was simply to find out for myself if features as fine as dermal ridges could be captured in natural soils, and if so, if the resulting soil textures could be captured in a cement cast. I discovered the casting artifact process more or less by accident. To explicitly answer the question, I challenge Chilcutt’s interpretation that the textures on CA-19, the “Onion Mountain” cast, represents dermal ridges. For a long time I was unsure that the textures were really casting artifacts, but now I’m more or less totally convinced.

Dave: In your opinion, are there any true “dermal ridges” in alleged bigfoot casts that you have examined?

Matt: Sorry to sound cynical, but at this point I wouldn’t even speculate about such a thing unless I was able to examine the original cast. The whole copy vs. original issue with CA-19 soured me so badly that I wouldn’t even hazard a guess about any cast unless I knew I was examining the original cast. I do, however, remain convinced that through inference we can be fairly sure that CA-19 exhibits casting artifacts. I believe a cast that Thom Powell possesses, cast by Frank Kineaster, and called the “Bee Creek” cast from Oregon exhibits dermal ridges. The problem is that I have no way of knowing if they are human dermal ridges or not.

Dave: I know you weigh in on other areas of analysis also. What’s your take on the Memorial Day footage?

Matt: My take on the Memorial Day footage is that the question itself is symptomatic of the root problem of Bigfootery. Since the field has no real hard evidence such as a body, bones, teeth, or even a hide, Bigfootery compensates by fetishizing all the second-rate evidence it has, such as track casts, films, still photos, “nests”, “tree breaks”, screams in the night and of course anecdotal sightings. You see, even if any of those pieces of evidence are real, you simply cannot prove them to be so. The operative word here is ambiguous. Only a body or a goodly chunk thereof is unambiguous. Therefore, the bottom line is this; the “Memorial Day” footage is ambiguous, in that it could really be a Sasquatch, or it could be a guy in a suit.

Dave: Another book that has tried to poke holes in the bigfoot community is Greg Long’s book. What do you think about his take on the Patterson/Gimlin film and Roger Patterson as a human being?

Matt: Frankly my reaction is a mixture of the views already expressed by Michael Dennett, Scott Herriott and Roger Knights. As skeptic Michael Dennett pointed out, what we have in Long’s book are anecdotal claims, not physical evidence. I think what Long was able to conclusively demonstrate was not so much that Bob Heironimus really wore a suit built by Philip Morris, but that Patterson was a crook. Not proof of a hoax, but a huge red flag.

Frankly I think some of the strongest evidence that the film is a hoax comes not from Bigfootery or even bigfoot skeptics like Daegling, Radford or Dennett. I think some of the most damning commentary comes from professional Hollywood costume makers like Stan Winston and John Vulich who flat out state it’s a guy-in-a-suit.

If you want to find out if something is an illusion or not, don’t ask members of the intended audience, ask the illusionists themselves….

Incidentally, I’ve personally met and spoken to two women not mentioned in Long’s book who claim to have associated with Patterson. Neither gives a flattering account of the man. One claims Patterson’s “Ape Canyon” photo in his book was really taken near Yakima and that her mother threw gasoline on the campfire to make it flame up for his photo! The other woman claims Patterson discussed bigfoot track fabrication with her. I have no way of proving or disproving either of these women’s claims. So basically, the crown jewel of bigfoot evidence was brought forth by a con man.