A second controversial public figure died this week: Dr. Jeff Meldrum, Professor at Idaho State University and foremost authority on “Bigfoot”. By our modern-day standards he died young: afflicted with an aggressive brain cancer that took him at just 67. I’m not even sure if he’d retired yet from ISU.
By all accounts Meldrum was a lovely family man, exceedingly well-respected in his church, popular with ISU students, and absolutely beloved by legions of starry-eyed fans who believe we share this planet, right now, with thousands of massive, hairy, hominoid creatures in our temperate forests, supremely adapted to living right under our noses without detection. I definitely want to extend my condolences to all who knew and loved Dr. Meldrum. This world will be less interesting without him.
Meldrum specialized in the anatomy of primate foot structure, locomotion, and the evolution of the bipedal gait in our genus, Homo. He was the real deal, i.e., a real scientist with a PhD, working at a real university, publishing papers, etc. So, when he placed his nickel down in full-throated endorsement that *Bigfoot is real*, he lent an air of respectability to the field of Sasquatchery, and validation to the throngs of people who claim to have seen such creatures in life.
Meldrum was convinced that at least some plaster casts of alleged Bigfoot footprints showed evidence of mid-tarsal flexibility, as opposed to the more rigid midfoot and more distal flexibility at the ball of the foot in Homo sapiens. He postulated that mid-tarsal flexibility would be advantageous for a large-bodied, bipedal hominoid that would spent a lot of time walking on steep slopes. Thus, it became canon for bigfoot to have a mid-tarsal joint, and if even one footprint cast could demonstrate that then it would rule out a fake because the forger couldn’t possibly know about this unless they were a footprint and bipedality scholar of at least equal acumen to Meldrum.
Though this made approximately zero sense to me, Bigfoot fans lapped it up. Meldrum developed a rather lucrative side-gig as “professor who will convince you bigfoot is real” and he was interviewed countless times to discuss the subject, appeared on talk shows and documentaries, and I think even had a short run of a show of his own. He wrote books and maintained a busy schedule of jetting off to various Bigfoot festivals where he would deliver a keynote address, pose for photos with fans, swap stories, and sell signed plaster casts of famous Bigfoot footprints. Bigfoot was very good to Dr. Meldrum!
In another world, he of course had difficulty getting editors and reviewers at legitimate peer-reviewed journals to publish his ideas. He of course decried this as closed-minded bias from the ivory tower scientists who never leave their labs to get in the field to look for such things. Boy, did the fans love that stuff! Now he was a regular Joe, sticking it to the elites who think they know everything. Meldrum also decried this scientific bias against studying Bigfoot as smothering to the field: if young scholars can’t get tenure studying Bigfoot then they won’t study Bigfoot and the field won’t advance. I always found this ironic, given that Meldrum was tenured and promoted to full professor at a major, Land-Grant university based in large measure on the scholarship he invested in Bigfoot.
Meanwhile, avowed skeptics such as myself found this a bit troubling. In my mind, if Meldrum was convinced and using his credentials as a scholar of bipedal locomotion to assert, scientifically, that Bigfoot was real, then it was his responsibility to write up his analysis and submit it for publication in peer reviewed journals. If he was doing this and receiving unscrupulous reviews from editors, then those rejection letters should exist. It was a bit… convenient to me that one could claim authority without publication on a topic because the editors refused to publish on the topic. The narrative absolves the protagonist of any weaknesses in the data or its presentation.
Meldrum did have some success in publishing on Bigfoot, notably his 2007 paper published in the New Mexico Museum of Natural History Bulletin 42 in which he proposed a scientific name for Bigfoot: Anthropoidipes ameriborealis. This is an ichnotaxon, i.e., an organism named and described solely from the impressions it has left in an impression-bearing substrate. He went on to found his own journal: The Relict Hominoid Inquiry.
I found logical flaws in the ichnotaxon paper to be glaring, and along the way I was quite disappointed in Meldrum for his constant flirtation with pseudoscience. He was drawn into many high-profile cases in which his gravitas gave traction (and made money) from the silliness. Eventually, I reached an impasse with him: either he was pathologically gullible or he was in on the grift himself, and both possibilities lead to the only logical conclusion that he should be at least ignored, if not openly challenged.
At one point I did challenge him directly and I think that’s the only time we ever actually interacted. He dismissed me as “just another closed-minded skeptic”, which was fine. Whatever. But then a bunch of his acolytes came after and doxxed me, and that was a lot less fun.
Be that as it may, and congratulations for reading this far, I’m sad to see that his time as come to an end. Though he frequently left me in vexation, Jeff Meldrum seemed to genuinely love interacting with people and many of them credit him with their own interest in science and natural history. Pseudoscience aside, Meldrum was also a gifted scholar and if a little Bigfootery helped some folks get more interested in anatomy and evolution, then that ain’t so bad. Again, with my condolences to his family and friends, I bid you adieu Dr. Meldrum. 
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