By JUANITA COUSINS – 1 hour ago
ATLANTA (AP) — Two men claim they've bagged Bigfoot, and they say the 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, across the country from the remote regions of the Northwest where people usually claim to see the man-ape.
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 Friday 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 — http://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 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.
The much-anticipated Bigfoot press conference Friday afternoon in Palo Alto, Calif., revealed little more than two men — introduced by a self-styled Sasquatch seeker — claiming to possess the 7-foot "body" of a "bipedal creature" on ice in a secret location, awaiting an autopsy.
The men, Matthew Whitton and Rick Dyer, were joined in the press conference by Tom Biscardi, host of an Bigfoot Internet radio show, who said the men approached him with their "find," saying, "We want to talk to Tom Biscardi... They didn't want to meet anyone else."
Biscardi showed reporters two blurry photos, claiming one was the mouth of the "creature" while the other was another creature running through the Georgia woods. The men claimed they "stumbled on the creature," but would not reveal more because they were concerned about it being an "endangered species."
Biscardi reiterated his invitation to FOX News Channel anchor Megyn Kelly to come to Georgia and view the body, and plugged his Internet radio show.
He said there wouldn't be anything more revealed Friday, but promised that he would "assemble" a group of scientists to examine the alleged corpse.
Whitton recounted how he and Dyer found the "body," and said that more Bigfoots "paralleled" them as they were loading it onto a flatbed truck. Related
Biscardi said Whitton and Dyer had gotten death threats from Sasquatch fanatics, whom Whitton deemed "psychos."
None of this was likely to dissuade skeptics, even among Bigfoot experts, who questioned Biscardi's past ventures and noticed that the body in the freezer looked a lot like a Sasquatch Halloween costume available on the Internet .
"It definitely looks like our costume," Jerry Parrino, owner of TheHorrorDome.com, told FOXNews.com.
"This 'body' has little to do with Bigfoot and everything to do with a Sasquatch costume that someone developed after watching too many gorilla movies," warned Loren Coleman , who runs the influential Cryptomundo blog devoted to strange and unknown animals. "The teeth that seem to have been placed in the mouth could be my late mother's false teeth."
"I've had interactions with Tom Biscardi in the past, and based on that history, I would say that anything he is involved in is suspect," Idaho State anthropologist and Bigfoot investigator Jeffrey Meldrum told Scientific American .
U.S. Fish and Wildlife Reserve spokesman Tom Mackenzie told the Associated Press his agency isn't taking the claim seriously and won't investigate.
"It's not on endangered species on any list that we've got," he said. • Click here to read Coleman's reasons for skepticism on Cryptomundo.com. • Click here to read Scientific American's interview with Meldrum. • Click here to buy the full-sized Sasquatch Halloween costume. The Associated Press contributed to this report.
Alleged Big Foot found
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