posted May 02, 2016 11:41 AM            

quote:

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"This is the logical circle: Only crazy people talk about Bigfoot, so if you talk about Bigfoot, no matter what your background, you're crazy," he says. That, he feels, is a dangerous assumption, leading scientists to abandon their methods and turn away from empirical study out of prejudice and self preservation.

"A subject that will not get funded and will endanger your career may never be studied," he says. The resulting blind spots in our collective knowledge extend beyond UFOs and yetis, potentially blacking out less-than-lucrative topics and politically unpopular conclusions.

Stepp himself has given plenty of time, study and financial support to the search for the big biped. He tells the grange crowd, "If I was a biologist this would have been a really bad idea. But I'm a physicist and they expect physicists to be a little weird."

In fact, Stepp is willing to give consideration to a fair number of scientifically taboo subjects, noting that acupuncture was considered crackpot just a couple of decades ago. And he makes no bones about his own lack of expertise in biology and anthropology. Instead he proudly waves books by recognized experts in those fields and invites others to read them. But as much as he champions rigorous scientific study, he says science, at least our grasp of it, has limits and there are some things we cannot measure, test or know with certainty. In these cases, Stepp takes a rather unscientific leap of faith, going on his personal judgment and his trust in the testimony of the people he meets and knows

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posted May 02, 2016 12:36 PM            

I'm not really sure how open-minded he is about such things, although he doesn't seem particularly open. But I don't know him well.