Bigfoot and Planet Nine from Outer Space

47 Ursae Majoris as imagined by Debivort.  The proposed "Planet Nine" might look similar to this.

What should we make of the claim that there is an unknown entity lurking on the fringes -- an entity that would not overthrow everything we think we know about our place in the universe but would give it a tweak -- when the evidence in favor of the entity falls short of what is normally demanded for such things, but is sufficient to be suggestive?  This is an inherently "fuzzy" question, because ideas like "sufficient evidence" and "suggestive evidence" are at least partially subjective.  In such a case, it is important to have some estimate of the background noise of false positive observations; how likely is that the suggestive evidence is something other than a collection of false positives?  The answer to that question will determine how much confidence we have that the claim will eventually be verified, and our degree of confidence will strongly influence how much money, time, and effort we devote to the search.  However, in the absence of better evidence (or a better analysis of the existing evidence), it would be foolish to commit to either the proposed entity being real or to it being unreal.

From the title of this post and from the very vague language I have used, it is clear that I think it is worthwhile to compare and contrast the claims that there is an indigenous North American ape and that there is a large planet in our solar system beyond the orbit of Neptune.  The similarities are obvious.  The standard proof needed to name a new species is possession of a type specimen -- a body that makes it clear that the new species is both real and distinct from other named species.  There is no type specimen for a Bigfoot, only a collection of sightings, photographs, and footprints -- and it is certain that most of these are either frauds or cases of mistaken identity.  Likewise, the standard proof needed to name a new astronomical body is a series of direct observations from which the orbit can be determined in some detail.  There are no direct observations of "Planet Nine", only observations of small objects beyond Neptune that may have been perturbed by the gravity of the hypothetical object.  Yet the reception by the scientific community of the two proposed is very different.  Why?

I can only come up with three good reasons to treat the astronomical case differently than the biological case.  

1. The first is that astronomy is much, much, much more mathematical, so that it is possible to calculate (subject to a handful of reasonable assumptions) what size and type of telescope would be able to see the hypothetical planet.  This means they are able to give an explanation for why Planet Nine has not yet been seen.  In fact, the team that proposed Planet Nine has even attempted to calculate the odds that the orbital irregularities of bodies like Sedna are due to something else, though I suspect they underestimate those odds.  In contrast, as far as I know there has been no serious attempt to quantify how many "Bigfoot sightings" we should expect each year if Bigfoot is not real and all the "sightings" are mistakes or hoaxes.
2. Related to the first point, the hypothesis of Planet Nine is falsifiable.  If sufficiently powerful telescopes exhaustively search the area of the sky indicated but fail to find Planet Nine, astronomers will just shrug their shoulders and move on.  Belief in Bigfoot, on the other hand, seems to be perpetually content with fuzzy photos, dubious footprints, and the accounts of alleged witnesses.
3. Finally, the evidence for Planet Nine is objective, available to everyone, and impossible to fake.  The interpretation may or may not be correct, and how convincing it is in its current form is a somewhat subjective question, but anyone with a large enough telescope can confirm the raw data.  This is not really true for Bigfoot evidence.  Eyewitness accounts are entirely subjective, and the credibility of footprints depends on how they were discovered -- a process that cannot be independently repeated.

These are important differences, and all told, I consider the Planet Nine hypothesis both to be better science and to be proven correct.  Regardless, it is important to be prepared for the possibility that either hypothesis may be false and also for the possibility that either hypothesis may be true.

Science and Conspiracies

My students can testify that I have often told them that anyone with a Ph.D. in physics can think up a b.s. explanation for anything.  Sometimes this is just harmless fun, but sometimes it can cause real problems, even when it is done with no ill intentions.  I'm afraid a recent study that has received publicity is likely to be entirely counterproductive.  I am referring to the study by Oxford Professor David Robert Grimes that was summarized at sciencedaily.com under the title "Large-scale conspiracies would quickly reveal themselves, equations show" and by the BBC under the title "Maths study shows conspiracies 'prone to unravelling'"; because there are serious flaws in his approach, he is likely to increase the very skepticism he is trying to answer.

Let me start by saying that I understand exactly and sympathize with what he was trying to do, even without knowing the precise details of how he was trying to to do it.  

For one thing, although I enjoy the thrill (and sometimes creepiness) of the "What if?" that was so embodied by the 1970's show "In Search Of...", starring Leonard Nimoy, the truth is that pseudoscience rapidly becomes unsatisfying because it is so limited. That nudges my relationship with potential X-Files material in a slightly antagonistic direction, but what really gives it a shove is the unhealthy pattern of thought that typifies the enthusiasts of Bigfoot, UFOs, and ghost hunting.  For far too many of these enthusiasts, their chosen topic is only an excuse for their real interest, which is to play the role of a kind of high priest in a mystery religion that the general public is too stupid or fearful to understand and that is actively persecuted by a conspiracy of the government, the military, and the scientific community.

The other thing is, I understand first-hand how tempting it is for a physicist to build a simple model to see if it can provide at least a semi-quantitative explanation of a complicated phenomenon.  What he was trying to do in modeling conspiracies is not very different from what I was trying to do when I modeled the NCAA basketball tournament.

All models are simplifications, but his model simplifies too much.  All conspiracies have something to do with secrecy, but he appears to interpret this in an absolute sense, so that if any hint of the conspiracy were to become known, the conspiracy would immediately collapse.  Of course, some conspiracies are in fact like that.  For instance, if you are in North Korea, you had better hope that no one ever dreams that you are part of part of a conspiracy to assassinate Kim Jong Un, because even the merest suspicion of that is a Very Bad Thing for you.

Many, probably most, conspiracies are not like that, though.  In some cases, the "signal" can be lost in the "noise".  For instance, the Soviet Union got several key pieces of accurate intelligence that told exactly when Nazi Germany would attack them, but these were ignored because (a) Stalin didn't really want to believe them and (b) there were also a large number of contradictory, inaccurate reports.

Then there are "conspiracies" that merely have, to use a term from the Reagan years, "plausible deniability" -- and that "deniability" can be strongly influenced by biases and vested interests.  I think most people today would say there was a conspiracy for decades to deny the health risks of smoking tobacco.  There was evidence from fairly early on that smoking was unhealthy, but it is not what people wanted to hear, and the tobacco companies had a strong financial motivation to shout down that evidence and the resources with which to finance studies that would seem to cast doubt on the dangers of tobacco.  The tobacco conspiracy did not unravel because of some single revelation, but because a critical mass of the public and the powers that be decided to stop pretending that smoking is no problem.  [We have probably gone too far in the other direction now, but the point is that no one is now pretending tobacco is totally harmless.]

Another example that I think could be called a poorly hidden "conspiracy" is racial slavery.  In order to "justify" slavery, it was necessary to provide arguments and evidence that blacks (and American Indians) are somehow inherently inferior to whites, either or in terms of their intellect, or their character, or both.  Of course, the circumstances of slavery could easily be manipulated to provide "support" for the inferiority of slaves -- a lack of education could be called stupidity, for example.  None of this was honest, and to quote Chesterton, 

Against all this dance of doubt and degree stood something that can best be symbolised by a simple example. An ape cannot be a priest, but a negro can be a priest. The dogmatic type of Christianity, especially the Catholic type of Christianity, had riveted itself irrevocably to the manhood of all men. Where its faith was fixed by creeds and councils it could not save itself even by surrender. It could not gradually dilute democracy, as could a merely sceptical or secular democrat. There stood, in fact or in possibility, the solid and smiling figure of a black bishop.

What put an end to the conspiracy of slavery was not the amazing discovery of "the manhood of all men," but the decision to stop pretending to be in doubt of what was known all along.

For one last example, consider the Tuskegee Experiment.  It involved secrecy towards one group of people -- in particular, the black men who were the human guinea pigs -- but there was no secrecy about it at all among the medical research community.

They guys discuss the claim that Stanley Kubrick confessed on his deathbed to faking the moon landings.

What about the specific conspiracies addressed by Prof. Grimes?  The mere fact that we have heard of them means that no one is claiming them to be perfect secrets, and in fact there are supposed insiders who have spilled the alleged beans.  Prof. Grimes' model does not correctly describe its subject.

"Bob Lazar" claims to be a physicist who worked on alien technology at Area 51.

So the people who find these alleged conspiracies plausible would say we have a situation parallel to the tobacco conspiracy.  They would tell us that the information is largely available, but that vested interests work hard to suppress and discredit that information, and most of the public simply does not want to know the truth.

In conclusion, there is no shortcut for evaluating whether or not an alleged conspiracy is true or even plausible.  The only way to find that out is by examining the substance of the claims.

What Do Neon Slugs Tell Us About Bigfoot?

Nothing, really.  How could any reasonable person expect them to?

Some fans of cryptozoology, though, think otherwise.

Mount Kaputar in Australia is apparently a kind of snail paradise, serving as home to a number of rare species of snails and slugs with little predation from vertebrates.  New Guinea may have its birds of paradise, but Mount Kaputar has the slugs of paradise -- large, hot pink slugs.  (Sexual selection drives the colors, patterns, and displays of the birds of paradise, but the reason for the hot pink color is not yet known.)  Until recently, these were thought to be just a variant of the red triangle slug, but careful morphological and genetic studies now indicate that these slugs should be grouped under a new species name.

Although this has nothing obvious to do with cryptozoology, it was reported on cryptozoology web sites (to which I will not here link), usually with the "therefore ..." unstated -- until, predictably, one of the regulars filled in what the take-home message was supposed to be:

You can have something like that crawling around, suddenly Bigfoot ain’t so farfetched, eh?

A statement like that isn't just pseudoscientific; it's pseudorational.  It's pseudoscientific because it seems intended to be the same kind of statement as when biologists say that, based on what we have discovered so far, probably around 90% of all species remain undescribed, whereas in fact, the writer's confidence that Bigfoot is a real, corporeal animal has no relationship whatsoever to science.

First a caveat regarding the word "species".  Sadly, determining what constitutes a species is not at all as straightforward as it seemed in my elementary school textbooks.  Those books said that two animals are of different species if they cannot produce offspring with each other or if, as with a horse and donkey producing a mule, the offspring is always infertile.  That is not really something that paleontologists can usually confirm or deny, though, so they have tended to create new species names whenever the differences seemed large enough to justify it -- in the process creating far too many species names, since sometimes two pieces of animals (for example, heads and legs) would be found separately and assigned different species, or juveniles would be mistaken to be different species than the adults, or the differences between males and females would be mistaken for the differences between different species.  Even when genetic information is available, though, the meaning of "species" has changed, as is clear when we are told that most of us are hybrids of two or three "species" of humans -- Homo sapiens, Neanderthals, and for many, the Denisovans.  (Even this is messed up, since according to taxonomic convention, Carl Linnaeus is the "type specimen" of Homo sapiens, meaning the species is defined by him.  Because he was a European, though, he must have had some Neanderthal ancestry, if the genetics studies are correct.)  In many cases, species boundaries are fuzzy, indistinct, and ultimately dependent on the varying criteria used to set them.

What can we infer from the discovery that the bright pink slugs of Mount Kaputar are a different species?  Extrapolations can be constructed on the basis of a "sample space".  A sample space has to be a collection of genuine possibilities, of which the observed cases can be said to be a typical sample.  For example, the trans-Neptunian object Sedna is near the limits of modern telescopes even when it is closest to the sun (at about 76 times the earth-sun distance), but it follows a very eccentric orbit.  Kepler's 2nd Law insures that Sedna is most often near its farthest point from the sun -- 937 times as far away as earth is.  Our sample space would consist of all possible numbers (consistent with current observations, that is) of Sedna-like objects at random locations on their orbits.  If Sedna is unique, we have been remarkably lucky to catch it in the brief period it is close enough to the sun for us to see.  It is much more likely that there are dozens, maybe even hundreds, of Sedna-like objects orbiting the sun.

What would be a corresponding sample space for these slugs?  As with the case of Sedna, it would have to be built of a population of possibilities that are related to the discovery about the slugs, so how would the discovery be described?

• The existence of the pink slugs had been known already; in that sense they were not a new discovery at all.  
• They are obviously somewhat different in appearance than red triangle slugs, but not so different in coloration or size to be obviously a different species.   
• It could not have been "ethno-known" that they are a different species from red triangle slugs, since "species", with all its caveats and technicalities, does not entirely correspond to any concept outside modern biology.
• The slugs are restricted to a remote, relatively inaccessible, and geographically limited range.
• This was an evolutionary, not a revolutionary, change for science.  That's not an insult -- almost all science is that way -- but it serves to put the discovery into context.

Reasonable inferences, then, would include the following.

• Genetic studies will show that other isolated populations of invertebrates with no visible differences are in fact different species.  (This happens all the time.)
• Genetic studies will show that other isolated populations of land animals with no visible differences are in fact different species.  (Again, this is common.  It happened just recently with crocodiles, even though their populations do not appear to be as completely isolated.)

Every time the sample space is expanded, though, the inferences become less useful.  We're approaching the season of predictions for 2014, so we can take an example from the kinds of predictions psychics make. 

• An actor who played a central character in MASH will die in 2014.  This has a very small "sample space", making it an interesting prediction.  It might well come true, but probably has no more than a 10% chance of coming true at random.
• An actor who played a character on at least one episode of MASH will die in 2014.  This includes many more actors, so it is easier for this to come true. However, the implications of this for Alan Alda aren't quite so scary.
• An actor who played a character on TV during the 1970's or 1980's will die.  It would be something like a miracle if this did not happen.  It's a prediction so safe as to be utterly useless.

Now let's look at the characteristics of a discovery of Bigfoot.

• The mere existence of Bigfoot is not recognized by science at all.
• Anything that could be called a "Bigfoot" would be obviously different from any animal known to have ever existed.  It would be larger and heavier than known human relatives like Paranthropus, and with different feet.  No other ape is known to be fully bipedal, including Gigantopithecus.
• It is claimed that Bigfoot is ethno-known, on the basis of both modern alleged sightings and American Indian folklore.
• Alleged Bigfoot sightings come from every U.S. state other than Hawaii and several of the Canadian provinces.  Depending on whether cryptids like the Almas, Yeti, and Yowie are considered the same thing as Bigfoot, this range might be extended to cover much of the world.
• The verified discovery of a real Bigfoot would be a revolutionary discovery for (at least) primatology, evolutionary biology, and anthropology.  It would easily be worth a Nobel Prize.

In order to expand the sample space to include the discovery of Bigfoot, the sample space would have to include the addition of a new species of any land animal, important or unimportant, known or unknown, obviously different of visually indistinguishable, with a range of any size whatsoever.  With a sample space that big, only thing that can be said is that new species of animals remain unnamed, a fact as indisputable as that someone who has appeared on TV will die in the next 12 months.  The implications of this for the existence of Bigfoot, though, are even less than the implications of "an actor will die" for Alan Alda.

Bigfoot DNA Article: Peer Review

Not long ago, an article was "published" making the remarkable claim of genetic evidence showing the existence of a population of "Bigfoot" being (a) real and (b) some sort of hybrid between humans and some unknown non-human primate. "Published" is in quotation marks because of the odd manner in which the paper was finally presented:  Melba Ketchum, the author, bought a little-known web journal that was apparently going out of business anyhow, renamed it De Novo, and published her own paper. She claims that her paper had already passed peer review in the earlier incarnation of the journal (the Journal of Advanced Zoological Exploration in Zoology), but that the journal's lawyers would not agree to it being published; she also claims that the decision to publish her article was not her own, but that of the (unnamed) editorial staff of De Novo.  She further claims that she had to take these steps in order to make this important work available to the public, although it could have been made available at lower cost both to herself and the public if she had simply uploaded the pdf file to a web page or preprint server.  Unsurprisingly, this article, which would have been controversial enough without the theatrics, has gained little support outside the community of those who were at least already convinced that Bigfoot is a real, biological entity, not just a cultural phenomenon. 

I am not going to address the details of her genetic analysis because I lack the background to do so.  (Incidentally, her own qualifications for interpreting the genetic tests are also shaky.  Dr. Melba Ketchum is a veterinarian, which, although it does relate to biology, involves very different training than that of a research biologist.  The actual genetic tests were apparently carried out by commercial labs at her expense, with her contribution being the interpretation of the results.)  Instead, I will concentrate on some misconceptions regarding peer review that I noticed on a prominent cryptozoology blog.  My comments here will largely recapitulate comments I made there under a pseudonym.



First of all, let me clear up what peer review is not.  Peer review is not the acceptance of an idea by one or a few people with Ph.D.s.  Passing peer review is also not a golden ticket that makes an idea scientifically respectable. Papers published in obscure journals tend to remain obscure; even papers in well-known journals may be overlooked, or their true significance may not be understood right away.  Papers are often published that are controversial or speculative, and on occasion they are published in spite of the expressed reservations of the editors.  An excellent example is the publication of an article on the (since discredited, but never really respectable) "Torah code" in the journal Statistical Science.

Peer review is all about trust and accountability.  There are two levels at which trust is important.  

(1) Most fundamentally, of course, scientists have to trust that any mistakes are honest mistakes, not deliberate fraud.  Even deliberate fraud will eventually be uncovered by subsequent experiments, but the amount of time, expense, and even danger may be greatly increased by fraudulent data.

Peer review is really not particularly good at exposing deliberate fraud unless the fraud is especially amateurish; even in those cases it may go overlooked for a surprisingly long time.  

What, then, guards against scientific fraud?  Two things.  The first is that real data will almost certainly be obtained later that will sharply contradict any fraudulent data.   The second is that the resulting loss of reputation can be toxic to a career, making it impossible to get papers published, obtain grants, or hold any academic position.  In a recent prominent case, a German physicist lost his Ph.D. because he was judged unworthy of it -- for a fraud that took place after he earned his doctorate.  Just earning the Ph.D., to say nothing of the professional work that follows, is hard enough that no sane person would carelessly endanger it.

How does this apply to the Ketchum case?  Well, she is not a research scientist; her job as a veterinarian is not really at risk, nor is any scientific reputation.  With nothing at stake, she will naturally be regarded with some additional suspicion.  She might still have been given consideration, but she could not afford doing anything that compounded the suspicion.

(2) Three hundred years ago, it was still possible to remain well-informed on the current state of all branches of science. The success of science in the intervening centuries has come at a cost, though; today it is barely possible to remain up-to-date on a tiny subfield of a particular discipline. In consequence, it has become necessary to have a "spam filter". That is what peer review really does; a paper that passes peer review makes it to the inbox, until then the paper is in the spam folder.
 
Of course, spam filters are not all alike. Some are too strict and put good messages in the spam folder; some are too permissive and let spam through; some do both; and some get it about right. Likewise with the peer review conducted by the various journals. Each journal has a slightly different scope -- what the journal is about -- and one thing peer review has to do is determine if the paper was submitted to the right journal. Different journals also have different length requirements (some specialized for quick notes, and others for lengthy reviews of the current state of knowledge about particular topics). Finally, they differ on the number of reviewers, the pool of reviewers they seek out, and the instructions given to the reviewers. This is largely what makes one journal more prestigious than another. This is why one journal's peer review is not transferable to another. 

Yet this is precisely what Ketchum claims for her paper. She claims (though does not present evidence) that her paper "really" passed peer review before, so there was no need to repeat the process. The only sense in which this is true is that the journal she bought seems to have barely been hanging on to existence anyhow, with no apparent reputation and (from what I could find on the Wayback Machine) no clear statement of scope and no instructions for reviewers.

The upshot is that Ketchum either completely fails to understand what peer review is about or (worse) does understand but is deliberately attempting to deceive those who do not. In either case, she will find it hard to earn respect from people who have dedicated their lives to science.

Just So Stories and Hoaxes

In an earlier post, I discussed how a scientist's training to find meaning in data can sometimes lead him to find meaning where there is none.  This is bad enough when dealing with data from real, honest experiments, but it can become a real problem when dealing with forgeries and hoaxes.  There is always the risk that random variations, or artistic touches, will be interpreted as having more meaning even than the original trickster had intended.

Of course, scientific training frequently is helpful in detecting a hoax, since the scientist may notice errors and inconsistencies not obvious to the untrained eye.  The scientist may even have ideas about how he could pull off a better hoax.  That doesn't change the fact that scientists are not really trained in either producing or detecting forgeries.  On the contrary, if a scientist really trusts the data, the very flaws in the hoax may be taken as indications of behavior that is even more novel and exciting than was previously expected. 

This is exactly the mindset that prevails in pathological science:  a scientist attempting to perform a real experiment acquires a kind of "target fixation" that blinds him to the importance of serious objections and flaws in the methodology.  This happens all the time, even in science that is merely flawed, not pathological.  Remember the faster-than-light neutrinos?  That would have been a hugely exciting result, and it was not easy to find errors, so it got a lot of attention both from the media and theorists.  Scientists tend to be careful in their experiments but then to trust their data, and to expect interesting surprises.

The problem comes when the data comes from an "experiment" performed by someone else.  Case in point:  crop circles.  When the first reports (or, as some would have it, the first modern reports ... yeah, whatever) came out, there were attempts by some scientists to take the phenomenon seriously as a product of nature.  Perhaps the most visible of these was Terence Meaden, who proposed some sort of plasma whirlwinds were producing them.  As the crop circles got more and more complicated, the proposed means by which they could have been formed naturally became increasingly implausible. By the time it was admitted that many (probably all) crop circles are man-made, these ideas looked very naive.

Another reason why scientists may not be the best at detecting frauds is that the culture of science is very open.  It is not enough to say, "I have determined that this is a fraud" -- one must also explain how that determination was made.  This, notably, is something that the US Mint refuses to do regarding currency; they give several means that can be used to differentiate legitimate currency from the counterfeit, but they don't disclose all the markers they use.  Contrast that with what is said beginning 4:43 in the clip below.  "If it was faked, it was done by a human anatomist who was a real genius."  

Not necessarily.  For one thing, it is not uncommon for artists to study anatomy, but in any event, only the most casual joker would make a foot that was nothing but a bigger-than-average human foot.  Perhaps this change was made in artistic inspiration, or perhaps as as a result of anatomical considerations, but in any event there can be no certainty that this was made by an 800-lb biped.  What's worse, since this episode was aired in 1977, it has given a clue to anyone planning a sophisticated hoax of a marker that might be looked for.  Other markers have been revealed by other sources, so now someone with skill and patience who wants to make fake tracks can prepare a hoax to fool the "experts". 

But surely it is too hard for them to fake the footprints?  Not at all.  Remember, most footprints, whether of Bigfoot or of anything else, are in pretty poor condition.  That's an aspect of realism, but it certainly helps anyone planning a prank.  More importantly, people are more clever than we give them credit for.  Look at the act below.  The couple does not claim to have magic powers, and it is pretty easy to guess some of the basics of how the do these things -- but how they are able to do it so smoothly, so quickly, and so often is still amazing.  What if someone like this, or like David Copperfield, decided to fake Bigfoot prints?  Could he fool scientists who have been trained to trust their data and who have published accounts of what they are looking for?  You bet he could!

Some scientists still remember this, and that is why they are not quick to accept the idea that footprints prove the existence of Sasquatch.

Bigfoot Research: Pseudoscience, Pathological Science, or Something Else?

Rather than looking at cryptozoology as a whole, let's take a look at what is probably its most familiar example:  Bigfoot research.  Based on my previous post, does it meet the standards of either pseudoscience or pathological science?



It's pretty clear that it cannot be pathological science.  In particular, Langmuir's talk went a long way towards defining pathological science lists 6 symptoms:  

1. "The maximum effect that is observed is produced by a causative agent of barely detectable intensity, and the magnitude of the effect is substantially independent of the intensity of the cause.
   
2. "The effect is of a magnitude that remains close to the limit of detectability; or, many measurements are necessary because of the very low statistical significance of the results.
   
3. "Claims of great accuracy.
   
4. "Fantastic theories contrary to experience.
   
5. "Criticisms are met by ad hoc excuses thought up on the spur of the moment.
   
6. "Ratio of supporters to critics rises up to somewhere near 50% and then falls gradually to oblivion."

Symptoms 4 and 5 may fit some Bigfoot research, but the rest do not fit at all.

But what about pseudoscience?  For that, we can look at the list of "defining characteristics" from What Science Is And How It Works, by Gregory N. Derry:

1. Static or Randomly Changing Ideas
2. Vague Mechanisms to Acquire Understanding
3. Loosely Connected Thoughts
4. Lack of Organized Skepticism
5. Disregard for Established Results 

The problem with trying to apply this list to Bigfoot research as a whole turns out to be ... that it's not at all clear there is such a thing as Bigfoot research as a whole.

So, for instance, it is possible to find websites that claim that Bigfoot are some kind of space alien, or that they are some sort of interdimensional beings, or whatnot.  Those are pretty much a home run for pseudoscience and require little further comment. On the other hand, there are more moderate claims that bear more scrutiny.

What about the idea, popularized through shows like MonsterQuest, that some sort of large, bipedal ape migrated across the Bering land bridge and established a small but persistent population in the Americas?  Let's go through the "defining characteristics" of pseudoscience one by one. 

1. Does this kind of Bigfoot research exhibit static or randomly changing ideas?  Not so much, in my opinion.  The ideas have not changed much since the 1970's, but that's due to the one overwhelming problem -- not enough evidence.  Still, those who subscribe to the ape theory of Bigfoot tend to keep tabs on developments such as the discovery of fossils of the Flores "hobbit" and archaeological studies piecing together the arrival and spread of man in North America, and they use these developments to tweak their own theories.
2. Are the methods used to acquire understanding vague?  Again, not really.  Most adherents of the ape theory really want hard scientific data; many of them actively look for hair samples, feces, or footprints, set up trailcam traps in hopes of a photo, etc.  There's nothing wrong with that from a scientific point of view.

That's not to say that some of the analysis doesn't strike me as rather far-fetched -- for example, attempts to see details in the Patterson-Gimlin film that seem to be too near the limit of the image's resolution.  There also seems to be some cherry-picking with data, among other procedural issues.  These are problems, but they still don't amount to "defining characteristic #2".
3. Are the thoughts loosely connected?  This may be more of a real problem.  Elaborate theories abound, but the connection to solid evidence and/or mainstream scientific literature tends to be tenuous at best.  Again, the real problem is that there is very little concrete evidence to begin with. 
4. Is there a lack of organized skepticism?  Yes, because there is a lack of organization.  Anyone who occasionally reads Cryptomundo will know that there are plenty of people in the cryptozoological community who are quick to pounce on a hoax or point out possible misidentifications.  Since cryptozoology has few if any peer-reviewed journals, though, it really does lack the kind of safeguard enjoyed by established sciences.
   
   A more serious problem along these lines is the emotional attachment to both their data and interpretations. Cryptozoologists may be willing to criticize each other's work, but they too often fail to exhibit the cautious approach that comes with self-criticism, and they too often lose their tempers when criticized by others. This is a very normal and human behavior, but there is no formal structure to hold it in check. Cryptozoology suffers because of it.
5. How about disregard for established results?  I think this is less of a problem than might be expected.  It's nearly impossible to prove a negative, so the non-existence of Bigfoot is not really an established result.  Unlike the interdimensional Bigfoot theories or the space alien Bigfoot theories, the Bigfoot-as-an-ape theory does not require violating the laws of physics, nor does it necessarily require violating the established results of biology.  Creatures that may have looked very much like smaller versions of Bigfoot once existed in Africa, but there is no evidence that they moved out of Africa before going extinct. And yes, Gigantopithecus was a large ape living in east Asia not more than 1 million years ago, but it probably was not bipedal, since
1. there is no evidence about how it walked, 
2. walking on two legs the way we humans do is a complicated stunt that seems unlikely to have evolved multiple times, and
3. Gigantopithecus does not appear to have been closely related to humans.

How about the characteristics mentioned in my earlier post?  I think it is a fair assessment that the more theoretical a study of Bigfoot is, the more likely it is to exhibit all the characteristics of pseudoscience.  I also think that many people accept Bigfoot as a physical reality not due to the evidence, but because they really want it to be true.  A world with a Bigfoot in it would just be way cooler than a world with no Bigfoot.  Also, it does display the warning signs of a nearly constant minority of adherents while being rejected by the preponderance of professional biologists.

On the whole, then, I would say that some Bigfoot research is clearly pseudoscience, but that the best of it, though usually falling short of the standards I would expect for good science, is at least not pseudoscience.

By the way, please note that whether something is pseudoscience or not depends entirely on its structure and methodology, not whether its conclusions are right or wrong.  Personally, my guess is that there is about a 1% chance that there is some sort of American ape that is responsible for the Bigfoot sightings.  On the plus side, this does not appear to be physically or biologically impossible, and there are a lot of sightings.  On the minus side, the sightings data are not consistent enough to be sure they represent anything real, there is the lack of convincing concrete evidence, and yarns about a creature halfway between man and the animals are so compelling to any storyteller that I would expect similar tales to be told all over the world -- and they are -- regardless of whether any real animal lies at the heart of these stories.