TrueAuthority.com's "Quest for the Giant Sloth": An Analysis, part I: Photography, External Links and John Lewis

The DNA code from the dung. Perhaps.
Image credit TrueAuthority.com.

Late last week, I made a post on a study which claimed to have found DNA evidence of the Mapinguary. Here, I hope to go into the study in far greater detail, and analyse the DNA result. The basic story is that a man named John Lewis went to South America, found a big pile of dung, had it tested, and found it to be a match for a prehistoric ground sloth. In 2001. After that, nothing else happened, but he did claim that he'd go back to the Amazon shortly after the DNA testing was done.

Lets start by analysing the pages on the website itself.

The main page, simply titled "Quest for the Giant Sloth", contains the above image, assumedly an image of the DNA result from the dung. But I don't speak genetics, so I have no way of knowing. A Google Reverse Image Search says that this website is the only place the image is present, so it is their own image.

Then there's some information. The pages are about a Mr. John Lewis, who allegedly travelled to South America in search of the Mapinguary, supported and financed by S.C.O.P.E (the Society for the Search for Cryptozoological Organisms and Physical Evidence) and the Cincinnati Skunk Ape Research Group, which apparently owns S.C.O.P.E.. There's also contact information: an email, a phone number, and John's own website.

Next to this is a number of links: "The Expedition", "Articles & Information", "About the Sloth", and "Photography". Photography is the least complicated of these, so we'll talk about that section first.

At the top of the photography page is a disclaimer...

The following are photographs taken by John Lewis and team during their expedition in South America. They are property of their respective holders.

 ... which, as you can see, claims the photos were taken by John. The images are of a Manaus river bank, some canoes, a capuchin, a howler monkey, a woolly monkey, and a capybara. Another Reverse Image Search told me that the first two are also posted on this other website, also from 2000-2002; the howler is from a Russian website which I can't read; and the capybara is from a number of websites. The capuchin and woolly are found nowhere else on the internet. Still, not a promising start - although one could argue that the images were uploaded onto TrueAuthority.com first, and then used by the other websites. But it's not exactly likely.

Next we'll examine the contact information. The website is merely a single page, with about ten ads and an enter here button, which takes you to an Error 404 and gives you a Trojan (or perhaps I already had a Trojan). As I am not in the US, I cannot test the phone number.

The email address does not work: however, in 2005, the email service provider that this address is using shut down most of its accounts, which could explain it.

Now, onto John himself. I could find few mentions of him outside of TrueAuthority.com, but he was active in small cryptozoological groups on Yahoo! and Google... in 2000 and 2001. After that, he just disappears again. Perhaps he did go back to the Amazon, and was captured by natives.

To be continued in part II. 

Read more about the Mapinguary.