Like I said, someone needs to stay on this and find out the “rest of the story” regardless of what it turns out to be.

I don’t know Arlene Gaal, never met her, but I’ve read her books and listened to some of her interviews, and she has alway struck me as very savvy and definitely dedicated.

I would guess she is just being very careful and keeping everything in check to make sure the evidence doesn’t get squirreled away somewhere or lost or whatever happens to stuff like that (I have my own theories about that, but we won’t get into that here:). So, I will sit back with my popcorn, in between movies and trips to Cryptomundo to see what develops…

The point is, schtuff happens. On a regular basis. With alarming frequency.

But all kinds of things happen to evidence. A not-intended-to-be-exhaustive sample:

1) Stuff goes in for analysis, and no word on whatever happened to it. Never have figured out what’s going on there.

2) Stuff doesn’t even get collected, because either the witness was totally flabbergasted or because the witness, not being a scientist, thought the video or the sighting was enough.

3) Testing isn’t conclusive. (Reading about this you find out that hair testing, for example, isn’t the slam-dunk science one would think it was at first glance.)

4) Stuff is lost, mishandled, dropped, left behind, forgotten, etc.

5) A conclusion may – just may – be affected by the researcher’s ability or not to conceive that whatever this is is real. Yep, scientists are influenced by that just like other folks. They’re people, with biases and beliefs and stubborn positions and pride and irrationality creeping in at the durndest times just like anyone else. (One reviewer of the Patterson/Gimlin film said that that had to be a real, unrecognized animal…but naaah, naaah, it just can’t be, I just can’t believe it’s real.)

You get the idea. One would think that there’d be one success. Boy, I sure would. But I’m sure that the general level of incredulity affects the seriousness with which scientists receive evidence, as well as ignorance affects what witnesses do (or don’t do) with it.

It seems to me almost impossible that you couldn’t have several – never mind just one – successes at linking evidence to a cryptid. Which is why there are only a few in which I would invest any chips (lake monsters not being yet among them), and them only because there are so many consistent eyewitnesses of good character that it just seems very unlikely it’s all being made up.

But frustrating? Oh yeah. It’ s that.

I admit knowing very little about this subject, but it seems to me that the consensus interpretation is that scientists make the evidence disappear (per DWA’s comments)? Isn’t the opposite interpretation possible as well though? Person makes claim about extraordinary evidence, claims it’s being tested by some place that wants to remain private, finally forced to reveal name, place denies having the item – because it never really did have the evidence in the first place? People who want to believe brand the lab as part of a conspiracy rather than the original claimant as a hoaxer? That’s the classic pattern of fraud in UFOlogy, usually involving bits of metal supposedly incapable of being manufactured on earth or claiming Kodak or someone authenticated a UFO photo.

Have some “faith” now, will ya???

Whatever this turns out to be, it IS definitely worth looking into.

Although I agree with DWA.

The mishandling of evidence in cryptozoology is legendary.