If you hold a current US passport you are more likely to be abducted by aliens.
Black people just don't seem to see Bigfoot!" says renowned Bigfoot, UFO and submersible-dinosaur expert Dr Gerry Garciaman.
This controversial statement was made at the Bigfoot, Cryptozoology and Texas Hold 'em Poker tournament in Rotorua last weekend, and is in reference to the results from his worldwide Bigfoot sighting survey.
Like all top cryptozoologists, Dr Gerry has been doing most of his Bigfoot research on the internet, via blogs and chat rooms.
"It appears to be mainly white, American middle-class males who have encounters with Bigfoot. Statistically speaking, African Americans, Asians and even women don't tend to see the beast anywhere near as much, or, if they do, they certainly don't report it."
So if you are an Asian woman, you are 2.5 million times less likely to see Bigfoot than if you are a white, American middle-class male.
It should be noted these stats are based on the scenario that Asian women and white men are loggers in the Pacific northwest.
"I am not making any judgment calls by releasing this information, I am merely letting the statistics speak for themselves." He also accepts there is a margin of error of about 26 per cent, but is prepared to let that go.
He believes this research can be useful and suggests it's time to start looking deeper within the eye witnesses for the origins of the beast, rather than the woods and remote wilderness of the United States. He believes some people may be predisposed to seeing something and interpreting it as Bigfoot.
One documented case of an African American person seeing Bigfoot was near Alabama in 1846. Cornelius Jones claimed he saw a large, upright walking hominid drinking water in a swamp, but before he could get downtown to the Alabama Bigfoot Research Organisation to report it, he was lynched by a local mob for an unrelated incident.
What is perhaps most interesting about Dr Gerry's research is that this statistical data also rings true for alien abduction, with American, white, middle-class males most likely to claim they have been abducted by aliens.
The stats reveal if you hold a current US passport you are far more likely to be abducted by aliens, regardless of where you are on the planet at the time.
This suggests either aliens prefer to abduct US citizens or US citizens have a pre-disposition to "thinking that they have been abducted by aliens".
Dr Gerry - an ear, nose and snake-bite specialist by trade - believes there is a part of the frontal lobe of the brain called the cerebral ignoramus cortex, which is where Bigfoot-type activity takes place and is processed.
He believes his research can prove some people are missing a vital neuro filter, allowing far too much electricity to enter this part of the brain.
"In the average person this fuse or filter would trip before too much electricity enters this region. A simple way of putting it is that it is a bullshit filter, and they don't have one!"
These findings are indeed controversial but Dr Gerry is no stranger to controversy.
In 1996 he was ejected from a Bigfoot conference in Las Vegas after getting into a drunken brawl with a Sherpa, and in 2001 he was questioned by police about his alien abduction hypnosis regression therapy sessions in which many female patients were naked and covered in coconut oil.
Many question the timing of these stats, claiming he has released them merely to get publicity for his failing Bigfoot, UFO and Submersible Dinosaur museum, which is about to go into receivership, thanks to competition from a superior museum that has been opened in Portland by cryptozoologist Loren Coleman.
Coleman's museum boasts some of the best Bigfoot-related artefacts anywhere in the world and even has a large life-size model of a Bigfoot, which curiously looks nothing like the image captured by Roger Patterson in the famous 1967 footage but rather more like a cross between creatures in the TV shows Harry and the Hendersons and Alf.
"Since Loren opened his museum, I haven't been able to compete. He has actual original plaster casts of Bigfoot footprints. I have plaster casts of plaster casts and in some cases just photos of plaster casts of plaster casts!" says Dr Gerry.
I was going to contact Coleman to get a professional perspective on Dr Gerry's "statistical" claims but I ran out of time.
