In an interview with news.com.au, he said:

“I don’t think it’s necessarily an urban myth. There are too many people reporting sightings.”

(See here: http://www.news.com.au/heraldsun/story/0,21985,24370998-662,00.html).

The sad part of course is that there are very few videos/photos (which look either like feral cats or photos taken outside Australia) and most of it is your typical, “I saw it once and no one will take me seriously.”

The sadder part is that Mr. Rees is the Premier (like ‘governor’ in the U.S.) of New South Wales…

Thanks for the thoughtful response, and it is clear to me, too, that we agree on the most important points. I probably didn’t make my point as well as it can be made, and that point is simply that evidence such as the goat fur in this case, especially in the absence of a good provenance, tends to be very unbalanced in its value. If extensive DNA tests and other tests were unable to match the sample with any known species, the weight of the evidence in favor of the mande barung hypothesis becomes significant (though certainly not conclusive).

However, when the tests instead reveal the mundane answer of Himalayan goat, the weight of that evidence by itself against the mande barung hypothesis is only minuscule (a magnitude that I took the rash liberty of rounding down to “none” in my previous post).

Taken together, of course, the accumulation of evidence against the mande barung hypothesis is significant and grows asymptotically closer to conclusive as time and research continue.

The kids tell me that the Yeti at Disney World this summer looked real. However, as my eyes were tightly closed at the time, I cannot vouch for the evidence of their sighting.

I agree that this one tuft of fur failing to confirm the existence of the mande barung is not definitive – but I would not say that it does not hurt the case at all. It is one small piece of data, and negative evidence has a cumulative effect.

So far all attempts to confirm the mande barung, including this, have failed. This does not prove it does not exist, just makes it less likely. It also further tells us that people can find unidentified pieces of fur that can turn out to be from animals even outside their known region. Previous attempts to identify the fur were inconclusive for this reason.

I agree with your conclusion, as any true skeptic should. However, I don’t think the tuft of goat fur really counts as evidence against the mande barung, and I wouldn’t expect it to change the position held by a good researcher, even if his opinion is most likely wrong.

The goat fur was purely circumstantial evidence that could only help Marak’s cause, not hurt it. If there is nothing of substance, no provenance, to tie the fur to the alleged sightings, then we can only discount the fur as a gamble that didn’t pay. If, on the other hand, the fur evidence came with a complete account of its origin, such as a story told by multiple witnesses of an encounter with the mande barung in which a spear was thrown that scraped the fur from the creature or something like that, then we would have a nugget of real negative evidence after the DNA tests showed the fur to be from a goat. That is, if the local hunters could be so easily fooled by a goat, their other stories must be treated more skeptically, too.

Without such provenance, though, I think the goat fur counts only as a failure to find evidence for the mande barung hypothesis, not as evidence against it.

Poor photographic evidence is the stuff that fuels the
true-believer’s heart.

Poor photographic evidence also contributed to a frenzy
amongst some ornithologists surrounding the
Ivory-billed woodpecker. Exhaustive searches to find
living examples of this presumed extinct bird have been
conducted over the past few years.

I see now that Cornell’s Ornithology lab is scaling
back their efforts, and will be sending no full time
observers to Arkansas this winter. This saga appears to
be drawing to a close, the evidence for this living “monster” is decidedly weak.

In the end, science takes no prisoners. Rather, it sets people free.