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Aug 15, 2008 11:39 am US/Pacific
Palo Alto Announcement: Bigfoot's Body Found
PALO ALTO (CBS 5 / CNET / AP) ―
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This photo posted online by some hunters appears to show the body of an ape-like creature stuffed in a freezer.
searchingforbigfoot.com
A couple of hunters from northern Georgia plan to hold a press conference at noon Friday at the Cabana Hotel in Palo Alto to claim they have found the carcass of the legendary creature known as "Bigfoot" or Sasquatch.
The two hunters are teaming up with Tom Biscardi, head of a California-based group called Searching for Bigfoot, and planned to show off what they said is "DNA evidence and photo evidence" of bigfoot's remains, but not the body itself. They claimed the body was being kept under wraps.
Photos released online showed the large, hairy beast crammed into a freezer where it was apparently being preserved.
Biscardi said he believed the find was authentic. Many other details of the expedition and the exact location where the body was found were being kept a secret until Friday's announcement.
According to a press release issued by the men, the creature:
• Stands 7-feet-7-inches tall.
• Weighs more than 500 pounds.
• Looks part human and part ape-like.
• Is male.
• Has reddish hair and blackish-gray eyes.
• Has two arms and two legs, and five fingers on each hand and five toes on each foot.
• Has flat feet that are similar to human feet.
• Has a footprint that is 16.75 inches long and 5.75 inches wide at the heel.
• Has hands that are 11.75 inches long from the palm to the tip of the middle finger and are 6.25 inches wide.
• Walked upright. (apparently it was seen earlier in the day before the body was found)
• Has teeth that are more human-like than ape-like.
• Has been undergoing DNA testing.
This summer has filled quite the appetite for strange creatures in the news, fueled by photos of the "Montauk Monster," a strange carcass that washed ashore in eastern Long Island, New York.
That creature, which earned plenty of headlines in New York, turned out to be a viral marketing stunt. Earlier this week, a Texas man claimed to have videotaped a legendary creature called the Chupacabra, but the video looked like a weird dog.
The two amateur Bigfoot hunters who claim to have found Bigfoot's body in Georgia are Matthew Whitton and Rick Dyer.
Whitton is a police officer who has been on medical leave since being shot in July and Dyer is a former correctional officer, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution newspaper reported.
"We have a corpse," Whitton proclaimed, but skepticism had already appeared around the reported find.
Biscardi, according to some scientists, has been responsible for at least one Bigfoot hoax before, leading many to take Friday's expected announcement with an even bigger grain of salt than they normally would.
"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.
Messages left for Whitton and Dyer early Friday 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 on endangered species on any list that we've got," Mackenzie said.
(© 2009 CBS Broadcasting Inc. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. The Associated Press contributed to this report.)
