Matt Knapp thinks that Bigfoot research is a mess right now. “The facts are that in terms of progress, the Bigfoot research
community has ultimately made none. We are no closer now to proving
these creatures exist than we were 40 years ago,” Knapp told
Boston. Knapp blames the setbacks on the digital age, and the amount of
misinformation being spread in the form of photos and videos online.
That, and the fact that more people seem to be trying to cash in on what
they claim are legitimate Bigfoot sightings. “Self admittedly, up to
this point, we have not had anything worth presenting as real evidence
of this creature’s existence. If we want scientists to get involved, we
have to go by their standards, not our anecdotal ones,” he said. To help filter out the phonies and fakes all trying to make a quick
buck on something he believes in, Knapp is asking those vested in
Bigfoot research to rely on technology built out of MIT to prove that
the truth is out there. Knapp,
who runs a blog called “Bigfoot Crossroads,”
a personal site with updates about all things Sasquatch, recently
stumbled upon an invention created by students and researchers in the
MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab in Cambridge in
2012, called “Eulerian Video Magnification.” EVM is essentially a software that allows users to break down videos
to reveal things in them that are invisible to the naked eye. This
includes visualizing the blood pulsing behind someone’s cheeks and face,
or capturing changes in body behaviors that the average person is
unable to detect just by simply staring at someone. EVM does this by
“homing in on specific pixels” in a given video,
according to the New York Times, and then amplifying those pixels by up to 100 times using complex algorithms.Knapp seems to believe that if the program can be used for medical diagnostics—it’s intended use when it
was publicly introduced in 2012 by the MIT team—then there’s no reason it can’t call out fake videos...
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