Speaking through a spokesentity, Bigfoot Field Research Organization founder and president Matthew Moneymaker has summarily declined further comment on the London Royal Society's two-year-long Bigfoot DNA study whose lead researcher, geneticist Brian Sykes, responded to his criticisms here, nearly three weeks ago.

Published in early July, Sykes' DNA study determined many alleged samples of Bigfoot hair to be inauthentic—but also found evidence of a phenomenally dope ancestor to the polar bear, dating all the way back to the Pleistocene-era, but still extant in the early 1970s, free to harass Indian hunters and Himalayan hikers as it pleased.

Responding to a request for comment from the Discovery Channel's news arm, Moneymaker published an open letter in the BFRO's forum accusing the Sykes' study of being "corrupted at the sample inclusion stage." In an email to Black Bag, Sykes responded to the majority of these criticisms, and even offered, seemingly, to test any Bigfoot hair samples submitted to him, noting that the primary exclusion criteria had been financial.

"There are many more I would have liked to have tested but, at $1500 a shot, there had to be a budget limit," Sykes said. "If the first two unanswered questions about Bigfoot is 'Does it Exist' and 'What is it' the third is surely 'Who's Paying'."

A simultaneous request for a further response from the BFRO and Moneymaker, and several follow-ups, were finally answered this weekend, in the negative:

Matthew,

I'm sorry, but you are not going to receive your requested comment.

Thank you.

Sincerely,
Caroline Curtis
Secretary
www.BFRO.net

Further requests for elaboration from Black Bag, one regrettably brusque ("Wow."), and a second effusively apologetic, yielded the following clarification:

Matthew,

I was just trying to save you some of your time and trouble. We believe that what Mr. Moneymaker already wrote about the Sykes study was sufficient. His comments may leave some questions open, but there will always be open questions no matter what. He would have to write a book to merely address the obvious questions.

So, you can extrapolate logically how many book-length individual treatments would have to be written to address this complex issue's less obvious questions.

We were essentially asking for a free encyclopedia's worth of nonfiction prose: a gross misuse of Moneymaker's time and energy.

You can catch the sixth season of the Matthew Moneymaker-hosted Animal Planet reality series Finding Bigfoot beginning November 9th. And you can catch up on the previous 54 episodes and eight specials on the Animal Planet website.

[photo of Matthew Moneymaker via Animal Planet]

To contact the author, email matthew.phelan@gawker.com, pgp public key.