Frozen 'Bigfoot' a Giant HoaxSource: The Associated Press Posted: 08/20/08 8:07AM
ATLANTA (AP) - Turns out Bigfoot was just a rubber suit. Two researchers on a quest to prove the existence of Bigfoot say that the carcass encased in a block of ice - handed over to them for an undisclosed sum by two men who claimed to have found it - was slowly thawed out, and discovered to be a rubber gorilla outfit.
The revelation comes just days after a much ballyhooed news conference was held in California to proclaim that the remains of the creature found in the North Georgia mountains was the legendary man-ape.
Steve Kulls, executive director of squatchdetective.com and host of Squatchdetective Radio, says in a posting on a Web site run by Bigfoot researcher Tom Biscardi that as the "evidence" was thawed, the claim began to unravel as a giant hoax.
First, the hair sample was burned and "melted into a ball uncharacteristic of hair," Kulls said in the posting.
Photo Gallery: Amazing Rare Finds Reuters 1 of 32Mythical Portal to Underworld Found Archeologists Victoria Rojas (front) and Lara Hindersten (back) work at a site at the village of Tahtzibichen in Merida, Yucatan Peninsula, April 12, 2008.The thawing process was sped up and the exposed head was found to be "unusually hollow in one small section." An hour of thawing later and the feet were exposed and they were found to be made of rubber.
Matt Whitton, an officer who has been on medical leave from the Clayton County Police Department, and Rick Dyer, a former Georgia corrections officer, announced the find in early July on YouTube videos and a Web site.
"Everyone who has talked down to us is going to eat their words," Whitton said at the time.
Phone calls to Whitton and Dyer went unreturned on Tuesday. But the voicemail recording for their Bigfoot Tip Line which proclaims they search for leprechauns and the Loch Ness monster has been updated and announcing they're also in search of "big cats and dinosaurs. If you see any of those, give us a call."
On Tuesday, Clayton County Police Chief Jeff Turner said he has not spoken to Whitton but processed paperwork to fire him.
"Once he perpetrated a fraud, that goes into his credibility and integrity," Turner said. "He has violated the duty of a police officer."
ATLANTATwo men claim they've bagged Bigfoot and they say they have the hairy corpse of the legendary creature stored away in a freezer.
Matt Whitton and Rick Dyer say they stumbled across the corpse in the woods of northern Georgia.
Still, the Georgia men say DNA will prove once and for all that the frozen creature is Sasquatch. They plan to present DNA test results and photographs during a news conference later today in Palo Alto, Calif.
They're not winning over any skeptics, though.
"What I've seen so far is not compelling in the least, and I think the pictures cast grave doubts on their claim," Jeffrey Meldrum, a Bigfoot researcher and Idaho State University professor, told the Scientific American.
"It just looks like a costume with some fake guts thrown on top for effect.''
Meldrum said the DNA test likely won't prove anything and, at best, might yield a gene sequence that doesn't match any other known primates.
Whitton, an officer on medical leave from the Clayton County Police Department, and Dyer, a former corrections officer, announced the discovery in early July.
The picture they sent out in a news release and on their Web site www.bigfoottracker.com shows what appears to be a hairy corpse crammed into a chest freezer. The accompanying announcement describes the creature as a 7-foot-7 male, weighing 550 pounds with 16-inch human-like feet and reddish hair.
Messages left for Whitton and Dyer early today on their Bigfoot Tipline were not returned. They have so far offered three different tales so far about how they came to find the creature:
In one, the animal was shot by a former felon, and the men followed it into the woods. In a second version, they found a ``family of Bigfoot" in North Georgia mountains. In the third, the two were hiking and stumbled upon the corpse with open wounds.
U.S. Fish and Wildlife Reserve spokesman Tom Mackenzie said officers also are not taking the claim seriously and will not investigate Bigfoot because it not a federal priority.
"It's not an endangered species on any list that we've got,'' Mackenzie said.
this story is all over the internet they apparently found the body of "Bigfoot", if they really did, that would be CRAZY!!!!
Bigfoot may have been found. Maybe. We'll see.
Two Northern California men and two Georgians say they've got a body, a photo and DNA evidence pertaining to the elusive forest-dwelling man-ape and that they'll reveal all at a press conference in Palo Alto, Calif., on Friday.