Latest cryptid hoax part of a larger MSM fad?
There have been quite a few cases of cryptid-scammery in the past year or so, and with the announcement of a press conference this afternoon, a couple of of “Bigfoot trackers” from northern Georgia are going to trot out in front of the cameras to prove they have the body of sasquatch in a deep-chest freezer.
Ah, summertime… The season when tabloids and MSM trade places for a few months.
It’s a sad testament that the National Enquirer broke the biggest political scandal of the summer while the MSM are sending hundreds of reporters to things like the Bigfoot press conference. Is this the Twilight Zone?
Documented discovery, sighting, or capture of crypto-zoological or mythical animals are sure to draw ratings, especially during the slow summer months for news media outlets, but not even one of the many groundbreaking “discoveries” have turned out to be conclusively verifiable.
So in the spirit of healthy skepticism, we though we’d recount some of the recent supposed cryptids that have left many gullible people disappointed:
Remember that rotting shark that creatio-gandist Kent Hovind claimed was a plesiosaur a few years ago?
FAIL.
Or the infamous Lizard Man who reportedly chewed on a car bumper here in SC earlier this year? DNA testing revealed that the scaly-monster was actually a dog. 
FAIL.
A few weeks ago, that funky-looking ‘hell-demon’ turned decomposed raccoon in Montuak captivated the MSM for several days before the hoax ran its course. 
FAIL.
What about the Chupacabra that mysteriously became a rotten coyote last year in Texas?
FAIL.
Or that officer in Texas who claimed he captured the elusive chupacabra running from his cruiser on his dashboard camera last week? That one turned out to be a LIVE coyote.
DOUBLE FAIL.
And now, CNN, FOX, and a pile of ratings-starved news organizations are telling us that a pair of cops from North Georgia have the body of a 7′ 7″ Bigfoot in a freezer.
Let’s just say we’re more than a bit skeptical.
Anyhow, if any of you believe that these people really have a dead bigfoot in their freezer, we’ve got a couple of unicorns and a leprechaun tied up in our storage shed that we’ll sell you.
08/19/08 UPDATE: It was a hoax. The “body” was a just a rubber costume in a freezer, as we suspected.
Within the next hour of thaw, a break appeared up near the feet area. … I observed the foot which looked unnatural, reached in and confirmed it was a rubber foot.”
The Biscardi team immediately went into crisis mode. Biscardi called Whitton and Dyer at their California hotel. They admitted it was a hoax and agreed to sign a promissory note at a meeting set for 8 a.m. Pacific time at the hotel.
But when Biscardi got there, he “found that they had left.”
“At this time action is being instigated against the perpetrators of this fraud…”
This revelation just makes this quote from Biscardi last week rather amusing:
“I want to get to the bottom of it,” Biscardi said. “What I seen, what I touched, what I felt, and what I prodded was not a mask that was sewn on a bear hide, OK?”
So, if Tom Biscardi isn’t a liar and actually saw and touched the body, the fact that he was fooled by a frozen Halloween costume should permanently discredit him and searchingforbigfoot.com.
ShotsFromTheBattery.com and NateandDi.com have officially merged as the on-line home of Nate and Di Fulmer. Formerly the site of The Nate and Di Show during the infancy of the podcasting movement, Shots from 
August 15th, 2008 at 11:43 pm
In an unrelated story, a big foot costume was stolen from a local GA Party City…haha, finally a crazy hoax is not from SC. Now if we could just stop our troopers from beating people up, SC could be a decent place to call home.
August 16th, 2008 at 8:34 am
No shit, Austin. That thing in the freezer looks like a cheap costume with some deer intestines thrown on it.
We watched the press conference yesterday afternoon and feel we can conclusively declare that this is a hoax. They offered NO proof besides some fucked-up DNA results and an obscured picture of someone in a gorilla suit. No more pics of the “body”, no video from which the photo was taken. Lots of evasive answers to the skeptics(most of the press were), and they spent a bulk of the presser explaining why their story of the “discovery” has changed like eleventeen times since June.
Also, this isn’t the first time the “promoter”, Tom Biscardi, has pulled off a bigfoot hoax, either. Biscardi has admitted that he promoted a fake Bigfoot discovery in 1995, but now he claims the woman who said that she the body convinced his staff members before he visited her and discovered that she was “mentally ill”. PT Barnum would be proud, I suppose.
Most of Di’s family is from N. GA… my grandparents are, too. In 2008, I’m sure its hard to find people stupid(or crazy) enough to pull these stunts, but I can tell ya for a fact that the N. GA foothills are ripe in that regard.
Oh, and on a completely hilarious note… they must be reading our blog. Yesterday’s AP article said the message on their Bigfoot tipline says they’re out looking for “leprechauns and the Loch Ness monster”.
We’re still monopolizing the market on unicorns, though!
August 17th, 2008 at 9:00 am
While I will grant you that there have been cases of mistaken identity or outright fraud on that part of some seeking attention (obviously they were not hugged enough by Mom as children), there are those things which defy description and have been reported by people we can take as reputable. In the case of the creature caught on the police cam and the various “chupacabra” creatures being found throughout various parts of the southwest, it has been determined that perhaps we are seeing the development of a new species, a hybrid coyote crossed with domestic dogs are something along those lines. Has this creature been seen before? No. Therefore, it is a cryptid until we track it down, obtain a specimen, study it and categorize it.
People like Biscardi sicken me and the two “good ‘ol boys” from Georgia bring visions to mind of every stereotypical thing you have ever thought or heard regarding gun toting, ignorant red necks. Just listen to their story and you almost expect Bill Engvall or Larry the Cable Guy to come out and yell, GOTCHYE! But the actions of some should not taint the very real work being done by people like Meldrum, Moneymaker, etc. who do have evidence that supports some sort of primate or hominid out there that we just don’t know about yet. Do we have a body? No. Can we classify them or even fit them into any known class of creature? Not yet but perhaps some day we will be able to when a real carcass is found and studied by reputable scientists whose interests are in furthering man’s understanding of the world around us and those species with whom we are co-existing in this space.
We know more about space and the planets in our solar system than we do about so many things here on our own planet. In many ways, we are like the child who, in their rush to do something, sails right past other things to get to the activities they want to do. Such is science in our world right now. The mainstream doesn’t care about investigating continuation of life after death, ghosts, cryptids, crop circles or other things that are interesting to many of us because they just aren’t “sexy” enough. Mainstream science prefers to go for the sexy and the hip things that are “out there” and often ignore the very real and the very exceptional that can be found all around us that many want answers to. As a paranormal researcher, I always say that children see so much more than we do as adults because they have not had the wonder and the mystery of life beaten out of them as we have by the machinations of the education system and the society in which we live. They still see all that we once did but forgot. For some reason, there are things in the world around us that defy our neatly packaged vision of the world and challenge what we knew or thought we knew. The obvious reaction to these things is to explain them away or attribute them to something that we know in an attempt by our minds to make sense of what we have seen. Without someone having instructed me on what a dog was and its relationship to me as a human, I would have no idea what it was or what it might do. Even in knowing, I still am wary of dogs until I can assess if they pose a threat or not. Once my mind has matched the picture of the dog to the data stored in my brain and identified it as a dog, it then begins to assess the nature of the dog to see if it poses a threat or if it is safe for me to pet it. But when we encounter something for which our brain database has no reference, it catches us off guard and our brain immediately begins a process of comparing what we have just seen to the closest thing within our database based on our conception and understanding of our world. So it is very probable that a bear can become BigFoot and BigFoot can become a bear. When we can’t make a match and what was close to what we saw just doesn’t seem to fit, we become confused and then panicked about what we have just seen. In the case of the police video of the creature labeled a chupacabra, the creature overall just looked out of place and indeed, it was not until recently when a skeleton of a creature that was the same as the one in the video was examined that it was determined to have a skull size that was different than that of dogs and coyotes and the teeth, especially the canines, appeared to be longer than normal. Is it any wonder then that our brains which process information at incredible speed, saw this creature, compared it, could not identify it based on the knowledge of most seeing it and so it was labeled as unknown?
We need to do the leg work on these things and we all need to remember that education does not end when we graduate from school. Education is a life long process and pursuit for knowledge. When we stop seeing the wonder in the world and when we stop seeking answers to questions because we think we already know all we need to know, we stop developing and advancing and stagnate. There are more things in Heaven and Earth Horatio…………….
Take care.
August 17th, 2008 at 9:02 am
Sorry about that first response. Technology is great when it works, even better when the person using it does as well. Thanks.
August 20th, 2008 at 6:07 pm
That Kent Hovind pleisosaur/rotting shark was featured in a picture book for children about how Noah took two of all the dinosaurs on the Ark with him I recieved from my crazy fundamentalist grandmother in the early nineties. The full book is hilarious I only wish I could remember the name.
January 26th, 2010 at 5:22 am
Sweet Details I love some of the articles which were written, and especially the comments posted! I am going to definately be visiting again!