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PALO ALTO (CBS 5 / CNET / AP / BCN) ― Two men from Georgia stood by their claim at a Palo Alto press conference Friday that they had bagged Bigfoot and had the hairy corpse of the legendary creature stored away in a freezer.

Matt Whitton and Rick Dyer claimed they stumbled across the corpse in the woods of northern Georgia, across the country from the remote regions of the Pacific Northwest where people usually claim to see the man-ape.

"At the time we weren't looking for bigfoot," Whitton told reporters. "It was a stroke of luck, but we got it."

As they faced a skeptical audience of several hundred journalists and Bigfoot fans that included one curiosity seeker in a Chewbacca suit, the Georgia men said they hoped that DNA would prove once and for all that their frozen creature is Sasquatch.

At the news conference, Whitton, Dyer and Tom Biscardi, head of a Menlo Park-based group called Searching for Bigfoot, presented what they called evidence supporting their Bigfoot theory. 

It was an e-mail from University of Minnesota entomologist Curt Nelson, saying one of the three DNA samples that the men said they took from the corpse was "inconclusive," which could mean it didn't come from a known species. 

Another of the DNA tests suggested their captured creature had a human genetic makeup and the third suggested possum-like carachteristics.

The last result came about because the DNA sample was taken from Bigfoot's intestines, Biscardi claimed.

Biscardi wouldn't actually show the body, just photos. He said that he had invited Fox News to show the body on-air and that a number of scientists would be performing an autopsy on Monday.

They were not winning over any skeptics, though. Other Bigfoot hunters even call Biscardi a huckster looking for media attention.
 
Bigfoot researcher Jeffrey Meldrum, an Idaho State University anthropologist, called the trio's claims "not compelling in the least." He told the Scientific American that a photograph the men showed of the body "just looks like a costume with some fake guts thrown on top for effect."

Whitton, an officer on medical leave from the Clayton County Police Department in Georgia, and Dyer, a former corrections officer, initially announced the discovery by sending out a picture and a news release on their Web site prior to meeting with reporters at Palo Alto's Cabana Hotel.
 
Their photos shared with reporters on Friday showed what appeared to be a hairy corpse crammed into a chest freezer and the mouth, teeth and tongue of the creature.

The men described the creature as a 7-foot-7 male, weighing 550 pounds with 16-inch human-like feet and reddish hair. They referred to it as the "RICKMAT" creature, a name derived from the first names of Dyer and Whitton.

The two men did little Friday to address questions about the three different tales they had told prior to the news conference 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.

Whitton said Friday that the pair were on a hike for a camping trip in June when they found the creature laying next to a stream. "Some of its' insides were hanging out... it smelled like something dead, but we don't know what killed it," he said.

The specimen they bagged, the men claimed, was one of several apelike creatures they spotted cavorting in the woods about 50 feet from them.

"They were aware of us," Whitton said. "They didn't try to attack us or anything." 

Whitton said he waited by the body for about nine hours while Dyer hiked out of the woods and retrieved his tow truck and the two then moved the body out of the area and into a freezer, where the supposed bipedal, apelike creature has remained for about 60 days.

Biscardi said the male creature found by Dyer and Whitton was one of an estimated 3,500 to 7,000 Bigfoot animals in North America. 

He also defended the pair at Friday's news conference among skeptical reporters.

"Do you think these fellows would come this far and put their reputations and their jobs on the line if they didn't have what they say they have?" he said.

Biscardi also denied that he'd participated in a money-scheming Bigfoot hoax in 2005, saying that he'd been duped by a deranged woman who claimed she had two "Bigfeet" in captivity; he claimed he refunded those who'd charged to see a Webcast of the creatures when he realized it was fake.

And Whitton shrugged off a series of goofy YouTube videos, most of them now pulled from the video-sharing site, in which he and Dyer reportedly claimed the Bigfoot was a fake and featured Whitton's brother dressed up as a scientist analyzing it.

"We just decided to have a little fun with it," Whitton said. When asked why he didn't call authorities when they claimed to have found the body in early June, he answered, "I didn't see any need to at the time. It seemed like it would create a frenzy."

"I want to protect the species," Whitton continued. "Everyone would be up there hunting for Bigfoot and disturbing the habitat."

However, since their discovery, Whitton and Dyer have started offering weekend bigfoot search expeditions in Georgia for $499.

Asked why anyone should believe their claims when they already had shown a flair for tomfoolery, Dyer suggested that skeptics simply were jealous.

"They don't have a choice to believe us. We have a body," Dyer said. Added Whitton: "Everyone who has talked down to us is going to eat their words."

U.S. Fish and Wildlife Reserve spokesman Tom Mackenzie said the government agency was not taking the pair's claim seriously and would not investigate because Bigfoot is 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.)