SCIENCE/FICTION
Monster Mania! 'Big Foot' Promoters Promise To Unveil Mythical Creature's DNA, Pictures
HIS NEWS JUST MIGHT LEAD TO THE MONTAUK MONSTER FINALLY GETTING BURIED. BIGFOOT IS BACK.
Bigfoot, a hairy ape-like hominoid whose very existence is questioned by cryptozoologists, has been seen most frequently in the Northwest U.S. and Canada. The creature was most recently spotted in Ontario by two women who were berrypicking. The beast, also known as Sasquatch, has been reported in hundreds of sightings worldwide, but Wikipedia says that "most scientific experts on the matter consider the Bigfoot legend to be a combination of folklore and hoaxes."
Now, two Georgia men say they have a corpse of the species in a freezer somewhere near Atlanta. And today, Rick Dyer and Matthew Whitton, who operate a "BigFoot" tours and website at Bigfoottracker.com, will hold a press conference in Palos Altos, Calif., during which they promise to reveal DNA, video clips and photographs of their hairy find. The two contend they found the beast in Georgia's north woods.
"It was very frightening at first," Rick Dyer told The New York Times. “There’s a lot of comment being made that it looks fake, or it looks like a suit. “But these people wasn’t there when I was sweating, pulling this thing through the woods.”
The two Georgians have the backing of Tom Biscardi, founder of the Great American Bigfoot Research Organization. In 2005, Biscardi claimed his group had captured a Bigfoot that weighed over 400 pounds and stood 8-feet tall, but the claim turned out to be a hoax.
Crabby speculates that this latest discovery might have something to do with the million dollar reward offered in June by binocular manufacturer Bushnell and Field & Stream magazine. The two companies offered the joint reward to anyone who can "provide an unaltered photograph/video, verified and substantiated by a panel of scientific experts [including a zoologist and biologist], the evidence required to prove a Sasquatch/Bigfoot/Yeti exists."
But as LiveScience's "bad science columnist" points out, "This is, of course, a marketing promotion and not a genuine search for Bigfoot. There's no way to authenticate a Bigfoot photograph by itself; the image is simply a two-dimensional pattern of pixels. To truly prove a Bigfoot exists, you'd need corroborating hard evidence like a body, teeth, or bones."
Crabby predicts that we will definitively learn one thing today: where we can buy"Bigfoot for President" t-shirts.
Posted August 15, 2008
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