Mike Greene is a well-respected Bigfoot investigator, who has been tracking Sasquatch for 20 years.  He also spent 20 years as the Chief Investigator for the Welfare and Food Stamp Fraud Investigation Department.  In short, he is not a kook.  If he has footage, it behooves us to sit up a little straighter and watch with interest.

But here's the thing: if you want to watch his most recent footage, you have to pay him $2 and download it from his site.  If you share this video with anyone else, he will prosecute your butt into next week.  

Now, I think we can all agree that Mike Greene has a right to do whatever he wants.  It's a free world.  But I can't help but think that this move is only going to hurt him in the end.

At first I was mildly outraged by this move.  After all, science works by building on the discoveries of those who came before.  Where would we be if Louis Pasteur had charged people two bucks a throw to learn about pasteurization?  Or if Copernicus had locked up his theory of celestial mechanics behind a paywall?  Nowhere, that's where.

However, I think Greene is operating from a perspective of "citizen journalism."  If someone shoots an amazing piece of footage, they shop it around to the news agencies and sell it for a fee.  We the public are not going to see that footage unless the networks pay for it.  If none of the news agencies bites on the offer, then we don't see it, end of story.  

Greene's scheme just moves that pay point forward, to the general public.  The theory is the same - no money, no watchie.  It's just made more personal, more targeted.  More, dare I say it, distributed.

I believe in citizen journalism.  But I also believe in the open source principles of science.  As you can imagine, I was torn.

Although I can't tell you whether or not you should pay two bucks to see the footage, I can say that I bet a lot fewer people will be willing to pay the two bucks than would be willing to watch the video for free.  Which is to say, charging for the video is going to drastically reduce the number of people who watch it.  That can't be a good thing for a Sasquatch researcher who wants to show people evidence, can it?

I fear that this move might earn Green some cash, but it will only hurt his credibility as a researcher.  One has to wonder, did he just fake this footage to earn money?  I think there's enough evidence to suggest that Greene is probably being honest with us, but what about the next person who wants to charge two bucks for you to see his awesome footage of the Loch Ness Monster in his bathtub?  It raises the question of whether this is the 21st century version of the circus sideshow, with all the fakery that entails.

Insisting on payment up front casts doubt on the researcher's motives and honesty.  Sadly, in a field as subject to fraud as cryptozoology, researchers can hardly afford to have their reputation called into question.

Creative Commons-licensed image courtesy of Flickr user funkandjazz