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.

Geocentrism and the Three Sillies

The Three Sillies illustrated by Arthur Rackham, as found on Project Gutenberg.

Every once in a while, I come across the claim by some well-intentioned Catholic that Sacred Tradition demands that we adopt a geocentric model.  I'm not really sure what drives this kind of misconception; it may be an honest mistake about what the point of Church Teaching is, or it may be the same kind of thrill with being one of the few "in the know" that has led me to compare cryptozoology with pagan mystery religions.  Periodically these claims are disposed of by Catholic apologists, and it is not my intention to deal with the whole issue here.

Instead, I would like to deal with a more subtle argument that is occasionally tossed out by geocentrists.  Many of them have enough education to know that Einstein's General Theory of Relativity allows us to correctly describe the mechanics of the universe using essentially any coordinate system, including coordinate systems in which the Earth is non-rotating, stationary, and at the center.  Nature is satisfied with such a coordinate system.  If that coordinate system is as good as any other, surely preference should be given to the one used by the Church Fathers?

Of course, this misses the fact that Relativity specifically denies that the idea of a center is physically meaningful, and it is only physically meaningful distinctions that are in dispute.  No one will deny that the Earth is the center of the baseball universe, for example.  But is it true that just because it is possible to make correct physical descriptions in any coordinate system, no coordinate system can be said to be "better" than another?

The answers to a surprising number of basic questions can be found in folk tales. The one of relevance here is an English folk tale called, "The Three Sillies".  Please read the whole story, but the passage that most pertains to this case is as follows.

And the inn was so full that he had to share a room with another traveler. Now his room-fellow proved quite a pleasant fellow, and they forgathered, and each slept well in his bed.
But next morning, when they were dressing, what does the stranger do but carefully hang his breeches on the knobs of the tallboy!
"What are you doing?" asks young squire.
"I'm putting on my breeches," says the stranger; and with that he goes to the other end of the room, takes a little run, and tried to jump into the breeches.
But he didn't succeed, so he took another run and another try, and another and another and another, until he got quite hot and flustered, as the old woman had got over her cow that wouldn't go up the ladder. And all the time young squire was laughing fit to split, for never in his life did he see anything so comical.
Then the stranger stopped a while and mopped his face with his handkerchief, for he was all in a sweat. "It's very well laughing," says he, "but breeches are the most awkwardest things to get into that ever were. It takes me the best part of an hour every morning before I get them on. How do you manage yours?"
Then young squire showed him, as well as he could for laughing, how to put on his breeches, and the stranger was ever so grateful and said he never should have thought of that way.
"So that," quoth young squire to himself, "is a second bigger silly."

Although the stranger managed to eventually get his pants on each morning, the reader (or listener) is supposed to understand immediately that this is the wrong way to put on pants. 

What the geocentrists would have us do is just as silly.  Most mechanics does not really require Relativity; usually Newton's Laws are sufficient, and they can be taught to students with no more math than algebra and trigonometry.  

An example would be the trajectory of a satellite in a circular polar orbit.  For this, we can choose a coordinate system in which the Earth is stationary, but we still need to allow the Earth to rotate under the satellite.  Everything is easy to explain; the satellite is in uniform circular motion, and its centripetal force is supplied by gravity as specified by Newton's Law of Universal Gravitation.  

If we maintain that the Earth does not rotate, though, the eastward rotation of the Earth will have to be explained as a westward force on the satellite, a force that varies with latitude and is hard to justify in simple terms.  The real justification comes from a relativistic phenomenon called frame-dragging, in which the motion of a massive body "drags" the inertial reference frame with it.  In sane coordinate systems, this is hard to measure except near a massive, exotic object like a black hole or neutron star.  A very sensitive experiment, Gravity Probe B, was required to see this effect from the rotation of the Earth.  To calculate the relativistic forces from first principles requires coupled partial differential equations of tensors -- higher math than most people will ever see, let alone master.

The final answers for what will be observed are, of course, identical, just as the final result of putting on their pants was identical for the young man and the stranger.  Just as trying to jump into the pants is the wrong way to put on pants, though, the geocentric approach is the wrong way to do physics.  To top it off, the people with the attachment to the geocentric model always prove to have never even attempted to solve physics problems in what they insist is the uniquely correct way.

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.

String Theory: Did God Have Any Choice?

I am reminded of this question by the opening chapter of a book I have just started reading: The Trouble With Physics: The Rise of String Theory, The Fall of a Science, and What Comes Next by Lee Smolin.  Smolin, who is skeptical of string theory, has justified criticisms about the extent to which string theory has monopolized particle physics and the over-exuberance of some of the proponents of the theory's proponents.  He does not quote them asking, "Did God have any choice?" but it actually has been suggested by some enthusiasts that no, God did not have any choice; no other laws for the universe were possible.

You don't have to be either a physicist or a theologian to see that this is poppycock.  We can imagine all kinds of laws that might govern the universe.  We do this not only in scientific conjecture, but also whenever we write books of fantasy or science fiction.

Not only does such a suggestion both border on blasphemy and also contradict the everyday experience of telling, hearing, and reading stories, it perpetuates the idea that modern physics advances very much like it did in ancient Greece:  scientists sit around and tell stories, and whoever tells the best story "wins".  This completely obscures the fact that physics is an intrinsically experimental science.  The literature is full of elegant theories that nevertheless are contradicted by experiment, and Mother Nature always gets the last word.  Of course, the most damage was done by Albert Einstein, who really did think his theory was so beautiful that it must be true; so far, Mother Nature seems to agree.

In reality, the situation is not that bad.  The best book I have finished on string theory and why it is appealing is Out of This World: Colliding Universes, Branes, Strings, and Other Wild Ideas of Modern Physics by Stephen Webb.  Webb's book makes it clear that the "inevitability" of string theory is a conjecture (not proved) that is constrained by the known symmetries of the gravitational, strong nuclear, and electroweak forces, together with a dash of aesthetic beauty. 

To illustrate what this means, imagine I am trying to understand how many finger are on my right hand.

1. I perform one experiment and find that there are fewer than 6 fingers on that hand.  
2. I perform another experiment and find  that my right hand has more than 4 fingers.  
3. Finally, I declare that the laws of nature are beautiful, and a beautiful law would be that the number of fingers on a hand is an integer.  

There is only one solution left:  I have 5 fingers on my right hand.  I might make a brash statement that "God had no choice" but to give me 5 finger on that hand, given conditions 1, 2, and 3.  But of course, the experiment does not really constrain God's choice; God's choice constrained the experiment.  I could easily have been born with more or fewer than 5 fingers on my hand, as was the case with some of my acquaintances.  As for the requirement of an integer number of fingers, some people lose part of a finger, and in any case one might argue that the thumb does not count as a whole finger.

Why then is such a ridiculous claim made about string theory?  Either because the speaker does not really understand what he's talking about, or because he wants to make a shocking statement that makes him seem more important than he really is.

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.

Pseudoscience and Scientific "Dogma"

One often hears, "Scientists are afraid to investigate [my pet theory] because it goes against their accepted dogma."  Well, yeah -- if by "dogma" is meant that scientific claims should not be accepted without substantial evidence.  That's the true situation, but of course the speaker means that, although he may have barely made it through 9th grade general science, he is one of the few to understand science as it really is meant to be; one of the few souls brave enough to stare unblinking at a reality full of surprises. 

What such a person does is betray himself as not only arrogant, but also profoundly ignorant.  Such a claim is also a loud and clear warning: Look out for pseudoscience!

Let me give just a few examples to show that genuine science, far from fearing to question its basic assumptions and familiar ideas, is in fact continuously revisiting them on an ongoing basis.

• The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle.  Just a few days ago there was an announcement adding to experimental evidence that the original derivation of this principle, and part of the way it is often taught, is wrong.  The gist of it is that there are two ways of stating and thinking about the uncertainty principle, and that the original form given by Heisenberg requires potentially important correction terms, but another form, which was presented shortly afterwards and has both a solid mathematical basis and extensive experimental confirmation, remains correct.
• The isotropy of space.  From at least Newton onward, it has been assumed that there is no preferred direction in space.  This is brought into question, though, by observations of an "Axis of Evil" in the cosmic microwave background.  There's a decent chance that more detailed subsequent observations will resolve the problem, but in the meantime, theorists are playing around with new ideas about such an axis could have come to be.
• Einstein's General Theory of Relativity.  This has been tested many times, and so far no deviations from its predictions have been observed.  (Even "dark energy", though poorly understood and itself an example of an open-minded responsiveness to good evidence, fits in as a term Einstein first introduced, then removed.)  However, some predicted effects are difficult to test, hence Gravity Probe B.  The result:  general relativity passes again.
• Newtonian Dynamics.  Even though quantum mechanics replaces Newtonian physics in the realm of the very small and relativity replaces it in the realm of the very fast or wherever gravity is very strong, for many astrophysical calculations Newton's 3 Laws of Dynamics and Law of Gravity work just fine.  Or do they?  The speeds of stars in galaxies appear to follow a different profile than would be expected for Newtonian gravity and dynamics.  The commonly accepted explanation is "dark matter", but an alternative known as Modified Newtonian Dynamics has been proposed that was also hoped to explain the "Pioneer anomaly", although that anomaly now appears to have a mundane explanation in terms of a thermal recoil force.
• The rest mass of the photon.  If the rest mass is not exactly zero, then light is not really moving at the universal speed limit; like neutrinos, it is just moving so close to that limit (in our frame of reference) as to be practically indistinguishable from it.  Recent observations though, show that "the mass must be one hundred billion of billions times smaller than the present constraint on the neutrino mass, which is about two electron-volts."

All these are examples from physics, with which I am most familiar, but there are plenty of examples from biology and the other sciences.  If biologists were unwilling to accept startling new evidence, we would not have Homo floresiensis as a newly discovered, very recent close relative, nor would we have the Denisovan humans, who were identified by just a handful of bones and the associated genes, just to name two easy examples.  

How then can anyone say that scientists are stuck rigidly refusing to examine our own assumptions?  Pseudoscientists say this because they want to believe it.  It hurts too much to know that your evidence is found lame and unconvincing by people who not only have the appropriate specialized knowledge, but who also are willing to entertain all kinds of crazy ideas, so long as they are supported by sufficient evidence.

Remember, once again, the list of "defining characteristics" of pseudoscience from Gregory N. Derry: 

• Static or Randomly Changing Ideas
• Vague Mechanisms to Acquire Understanding 
• Loosely Connected Thoughts 
• Lack of Organized Skepticism 
• Disregard for Established Results 

If one does not follow science closely enough to see that it is not dogmatic, how can he have regard for established results?  He won't even really know what they are!  How can he have organized skepticism -- he doesn't recognize the genuine article, which allows for "crazy" ideas without immediately endorsing them?  How can his thoughts be other than loosely connected, when they lack the familiarity with the field needed to tie them to each other and to established results?  And so forth. 

Just So Stories and Scientific Research

I often say that because I have  Ph.D. in physics, I can come up with a b.s. explanation for anything.  Sometimes, of course, these explanations turn out to be correct, but the scary thing is that they can sound convincing even when they are not correct.

This is well illustrated by the following story, which I was told while a postdoc in Germany.  Unfortunately, I am not sure who told me this story.  Regardless, I think this story is true, and I know the idea behind it is certainly true.

At a scientific conference in the early 1990's, a Russian researcher presented some of his recent results in polymer simulations.  His data were graphed in a standard way, so that different slopes in the data curves would indicate different kinds of motion of the polymers. The scientist explained what his data meant and their implications for polymer theory.  Then he noticed a new curve along with the others, one with which he was not familiar.  "I'm not familiar with this curve," he said, "but it must be a new run made by my postdoc."  He proceeded to explain this curve, too, in a way that was logical, persuasive, and consistent with the other curves. 

Then he moved on to the next slide.  As he did, everyone saw that the "curve" he had just "explained" was actually a crack on the projector's face plate.

This is funny, yes, but also disturbing.  The data is supposed to drive science, and in the long run, I still believe it does, but in the short run, we are still too susceptible to seeing patterns that are not really there.  This is analogous to seeing shapes in the clouds, except that the explanations will seem very real -- they will be plausible and consistent with other experimental, simulation, and theoretical results.

This is a good reason, by the way, to doubt exciting new results until they have been independently confirmed a few times.

Cryptozoology and Science: Problems

In a recent post, I argued that cryptozoology is the search for animals which are not impossible but for which only weak evidence exists. I should have added that the animals for which cryptozoology searches would be surprising, which certainly fits the categories I enumerated and even more fits the list of "celebrity cryptids":  Bigfoot, the Loch Ness Monster and other lake monsters, Mokele Mbembe and other living dinosaurs, etc. 



A real problem is that cryptozoology

• is a search for conclusive evidence and 
• is defined by the absence of conclusive evidence.  

It is a putative science that is defined by its own failure. 

In physics, chemistry, geology, astronomy, or standard biology, the more evidence one has from observation and experiment, the better the science is.  By contrast, if conclusive evidence were ever found for the existence of Bigfoot, for example, he would cease to be a cryptid and become just another primate to be studied by professional primatologists -- not by cryptozoologists. 

That may seem to be nit-picking, but the reality is that the "scientific method" is cyclic, which allows both theories and experimental methods to be refined.  Perhaps some cryptozoological ideas may be falsified by the absence of evidence, but few could be validated.  So, for example, some Bigfoot researchers believe him to be descended from Gigantopithecus, some from a common ancestor with humans not long after the divergence from chimpanzees, some that he is something else.  With no unambiguous evidence that Bigfoot exists in the first place, there certainly is not enough evidence to constrain such speculation.  Likewise, a wide variety of techniques, including the use of recorded sounds allegedly made by Bigfoot, wood knocking, scents and pheromones, etc., are used to try to attract Bigfoot so that photos, footprints, hair samples, etc. might be collected -- so far with (obviously) no unambiguously positive result.   Is this because the methods are flawed, or because Bigfoot is rare (or does not exist)?

Remember, one of the "defining characteristics" of pseudoscience is "vague mechanisms to acquire understanding."  The fact that cryptozoology, so long as it remains cryptozoology, does not have enough evidence to refine its methodology means that it is always flirts with pseudoscience. 

This is the point at which Bigfoot believers jump up and shout, "But what about all those witnesses?  What about the DNA and hair samples?  What about the footprints?"  Some of those are suggestive, and they are the reason I think there is a 1% chance Bigfoot is real (as opposed to the Loch Ness Monster or visiting space aliens, both of which seem much, much less likely).  They constitute enough evidence to form a hypothesis, but not enough to confirm that hypothesis, at least in the opinion of the majority of biologists with some relevant expertise.  Not being a biologist myself, let alone a primatologist or expert in North American ecology, I'll defer to them. 

At this point, another problem with cryptozoology emerges, because by saying I will defer to the consensus of professional biologists, all manner of conspiracy accusations will be brought forward.  To be fair, I think it is the mostly the "armchair quarterback" cryptozoology fan who is most likely to believe that there are conspiracies to hide the existence of Bigfoot and other cryptids, followed by the untrained amateurs, but since these two groups make up the bulk of the cryptozoology universe, their schizophrenic love/hate attitude towards established science taints the community as a whole.  

The real problem with that kind of attitude is not that it is offensive, but rather that it gives cryptozoology a shove in the direction of pseudoscience.  Again, two of the "defining characteristics" of pseudoscience are

• Lack of Organized Skepticism and
• Disregard for Established Results.

The hyper-sensitivity of the cryptozoological community essentially eliminates the possibility of organized skepticism.  Members of that community distrust the biologists who actually have a process for organized skepticism -- and they also distrust each other.  That's not to say that they make no use of established biology or other cryptzoologists, only that such use shows symptoms of being heavily filtered through their ideas.

Finally, let me return to the "cherry picking" of data I mentioned before.  I have seen it argued that the consistency of the sightings of Bigfoot argues strongly for its existence.  Well ... not so much.  

For one thing, the idea of something intermediate between man and the animals seems to be deeply ingrained in the human psyche. Thus we hear legends of vaguely Bigfoot-like creatures from all over the world, just as we hear legends of dwarfs and giants from all over the world.  These ideas are simply too obvious for storytellers not to continually reinvent them -- and they're probably always somewhere in the deep recesses of our minds, too.  

Also, of the half-man, half-animal sightings reported in the US, there are very noticeable variations.  There are reports of Bigfoot speaking and wearing clothes or a hat.  There is the Michigan Dogman and the Skunk Ape and the Lizard Man.   If, from such a range of reported sightings, you select the ones that seem most like the creature shown in the Patterson-Gimlin film, you can't use the "remarkable consistency" of those sightings to prove anything.

Lastly, since the 1970's the media have been saturated with representations of Bigfoot and Bigfoot knockoffs (Chewbacca).  These provide a stereotype around which to understand any unknown.  Something similar seems to have happened with space aliens, which in the US are now typically small "gray" aliens -- though that was not the case 50 years ago, nor is it the case in other parts of the world. 

...

So, after all that, do I now consider cryptozoology to all be pseudoscience?  No.  I think that trying to construct a "field" of cryptozoology is fundamentally flawed, and there are serious problems with the cryptozoological community.  There is a good deal of pseudoscience done under the name of cryptozoology.  That does not mean that everything done under the name of cryptozoology, though.  Probably the best of cryptozoology should be compared with good amateur astronomy -- though not, so far at least, with as much success as amateur astronomers have had.

Cryptozoology and Science: What is Cryptozoology?

In my last post I argued that cryptozoology (specifically, some kinds of Bigfoot research) does not meet the standard criteria for pseudoscience, but that it still falls short of the standards of good science.  This leads to two questions.

1. What is meant by cryptozoology?
2. What is different between it and good science?

In this post I will try to clarify what at least I mean by cryptozoology.  I'll save the second question for later.

Cryptozoology may be defined to be the search for animals reported by witnesses or recounted in legend but either not recognized by science or believed to be extinct.  Such animals are called cryptids, so cryptozoology is the search for cryptids.


These definitions, though, are so broad that they cover very different cases which should be distinguished; each of the following have been called cryptids by some people.

1. An animal known to currently exist, but not in the location where it was seen.  The sightings of big cats in Britain fall into this category.
2. An animal which is known to have existed and is believed to have gone extinct during human history, but for which there are unconfirmed sightings after its presumed extinction.  Alleged sightings of the Ivory-billed Woodpecker and of the Tasmanian Wolf fall into this category.
3. An animal which is known to have existed and is believed to have gone extinct before the dawn of human history, but for which there are unconfirmed sightings.  Alleged sightings of dinosaurs and pterosaurs fit this category.
4. An animal which is not known to have ever existed, but which is biologically possible and for which there are unconfirmed sightings.  Alleged sightings of Bigfoot go here, since Bigfoot seems to be either an ape that has independently evolved a preference for bipedalism or a relative that diverged from us at or about the time of the Australopithecines. 
5. A creature which appears to be biologically and/or physically impossible.  Mermaids, which make no sense biologically, and werewolves, which appear to violate the laws of physics, go here. 

Category 1 is really pretty boring.  There is a long, sad history of people bringing exotic pets or specimens into an area outside that animal's normal range and releasing it, usually with disastrous consequences for the pet, sometimes with disastrous consequences for the local environment.

Category 5, on the other hand, belongs in the category of the paranormal, if not in the category of pure fiction.  As with Category 1, many self-professed cryptozoologists do not consider these to be truly a part of cryptozoology.

Category 2, on the other hand, is dubious.  Even the most skeptical are not surprised that sometimes announcements of extinction are premature, though some survivals would be more surprising than others.  It seems much more likely, for example, that the Ivory-Billed Woodpecker is still in existence than that the Dodo still survives.

That leaves Category 3 and 4 as the solid core of what is meant by cryptozoology, with Category 2 on the edge and Categories 1 and 5 outside the boundaries.  The upshot, then, is that cryptozoology is the search for animals which are not impossible but for which only weak evidence exists.

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.

Pseudoscience vs. Pathological Science

A comment asking about pathological science was left on my post about cryptozoology, so it's probably worth contrasting the two kinds of "science gone wrong".

• Pathological science is basically being led astray by wishful thinking and excitement while making observations at the very limits of perception.
• Pseudoscience is basically holding beliefs that are not subject to observation or experiment but still claiming they are scientific facts or theories.
• Pathological science is usually experimental in nature. 
• Most pseudoscientists call themselves theorists.
• People involved in pathological science tend to have the degrees and backgrounds that would prepare them for real science.
• Pseudoscientists are more often self-educated or amateurs. 
• Because of the background and experience of the person who generates pathological science, his idea is often widely accepted among the scientific community at first.  However, as time goes on others find it difficult or impossible to replicate the initial successes; this becomes much more noticeable as experimental equipment improves.  As a result, support for the idea diminishes to practically zero. 
• Pseudoscience is less likely to become popular in the scientific community.  Because it does not depend on observation or experiment for validation, it tends to persist at a more-or-less constant, low level of support from the general public. 

A few important things must be pointed out.

• Real science may give wrong results through honest mistakes or bad luck.  Pathological science or pseudoscience may be factually correct through dumb luck.  The real difference between them is that real science has a methodology that can be trusted to generally yield good answers and to eventually correct itself when it is wrong. 
• A hypothesis can come from anywhere and still yield good science -- as long as it is subject to being tested by observation or experiment.  A good example is Heinrich Schliemann's discovery of Troy from geographic clues in Homer's Iliad.
• The scientific community can get caught up in pseudoscience, too, because scientists are also people.  A notable example is the rise of "Aryan physics" in the Third Reich, which involved some really big names in physics, and some Soviet science was likewise distorted by politics.

Cryptozoology

I run across cryptozoology on a regular basis, mostly because I have an interest in provocative ideas, but also because I have an interest in the boundary between "healthy" science and its unhealthy relatives:  namely pseudoscience and pathological science, to say nothing of outright hoaxes.  Exactly where cryptozoology falls in this range is difficult to say, in no small part because different people mean somewhat different things by the word "cryptozoology", but I think it's a fair assertion that much of what is called cryptozoology is contaminated to a greater or lesser extent with pseudoscience.

Right now I don't have time to go into this in any real detail, but if this interests you at all, please take a look at this recent post at the Tet Zoo.  I will return to the subject later.