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| Bigfoot Press Conference Yields Little Evidence, Lots Of Scorn |
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| posted on Sunday, August 17, 2008 |
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BIGFOOT PRESS CONFERENCE YIELDS LITTLE EVIDENCE, LOTS OF SCORN
By Erik Vance
Scientific American
August 15, 2008
Original Link
PALO ALTO, CALIFORNIA - It was perhaps the most highly touted press conference of the week, but it didn't reveal much in the way of evidence: Three bigfoot enthusiasts announced today that a series of genetic tests performed on samples taken from a carcass they claim is a Sasquatch came back as a mixture of human and opossum.
In addition to the mixed DNA results, Tom Biscardi, Matthew Whitton and Rick Dyer showed the audience two blurry photos, one of a solitary figure in mixed hardwood forest and another of the mouth of what appeared to be the tongue and teeth of a primate.
Nevertheless, fielding questions from a packed room in Palo Alto, the trio called their discovery groundbreaking and held to their claim that the animal they are currently holding in "an undisclosed location" is indeed the legendary bigfoot.
"We're not bigfoot hunters originally," Whitton said. "We stumbled upon this creature. It was a stroke of luck, I can tell you that."
Whitton and Dyer said they discovered the carcass when they were hiking in a forest near their home sometime in June and that it has been stored in a large freezer since then. They refused to say exactly where and when, stating only that it was in northern Georgia and that they captured video of several live animals.
They said when they found the carcass they hauled it into a truck and brought it to a freezer. They then set up a Web site to offer tours into the area and made an announcement on a bigfoot enthusiast radio program.
That's when Biscardi got involved, moved the animal to another location, and began contacting the media. In the week before the press conference, Whitton and Dyer spent several days sparring with skeptics and created a YouTube video where they held a stuffed bear up to the camera and repeated their claims of having found a Sasquatch.
Meanwhile, Biscardi sent three samples of the carcass to biologist Curtis Nelson at the University of Minnesota for analysis. In an e-mail, Nelson told Biscardi that most of DNA segments taken from two of the samples matched human DNA. One came back as a likely match for an American opossum. Biscardi said this is likely from a stomach sample and that the creature might have eaten an opossum. He did not say why he had sampled from the stomach.
Despite Biscardi's assurances that soon he would bring in scientists from Stanford University and journalists from Fox News to inspect the body, scientists are skeptical that the find is legitimate. "It's about what I expected," said Jeffrey Meldrum, a professor of anatomy and anthropology from Idaho State University in Pocatello who has studied the bigfoot phenomenon. "Today they should have produced a physical piece of the corpse, if not the corpse itself. Until they produce the body, it doesn't matter."
"What they should have done is contact a reputable scientist and have it examined at a known university," said Benjamin Radford, who writes for the Skeptical Inquirer magazine and has followed bigfoot hunters for more than a decade. "Instead, this whole thing is very cloak and dagger. It all about, 'We have unnamed scientists working at an undisclosed location under armed guard.'"
Meldrum said it's still remotely possible the claims are genuine, but that the group's behavior resembles that of previous hoaxes. He said that even if the genetic testing had turned up some evidence that it was bigfoot, no one can verify where the animal was found.
Today's pronouncement was not Biscardi's first. In 2005 he claimed that he had captured a Sasquatch. The beast never materialized, and Biscardi said he had been swindled by a deranged attention-seeker.
Radford says hoaxers make money off tours through bigfoot country and with documentary films -- a motivation Biscardi doesn't discount. When asked at the press conference how much money he expects to make from his alleged discovery, Biscardi said, "As much as I possibly can."
He said, however, that he will satisfy all skeptics when he releases the actual body. Earlier this week he invited Megyn Kelly of Fox News to Georgia to view the carcass.
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INTERNET CAPTIVATED BY BIGFOOT HUNTERS' PRESS CONFERENCE
By Caroline McCarthy
CNet
August 15, 2008
Original Link
It's the ultimate summer Friday news story: CNN Webcasting a press conference hosted by the men who claim they nabbed a dead body of the legendary creature known as Bigfoot.
Bigfoot hunter Tom Biscardi held the press conference in Palo Alto, Calif., in conjunction with Matthew Whitton and Rick Dyer, the two men from Georgia who claim that they found the corpse while hiking. Biscardi wouldn't actually show the body, saying that he had invited Fox News reporter Megan Kelly to show it on-air and that a number of scientists would be performing an autopsy on Monday.
"Starting Monday I should have assembled some fine scientists that will do the autopsy to find the origin and death of this creature, and at that point in time we will make it known and hopefully we'll get somebody to come in and film it," Biscardi said to listeners, "to show it to the world as it's being done. I want to get to the bottom of it."
That didn't do too much to appease the skeptical audience of the press conference, who were on the verge of heckling.
On the Web it was equally chaotic. Twitter users went nuts, with Twitter Search (formerly Summize) bringing up dozens of posts per minute from users who were watching the press conference online or expressing their opinions within the site's 140-character limit. Third-party analytics site Twitscoop showed a barrage of Twitters that included the word "Bigfoot," and determined the word to be the hottest term on the microblogging site at the time.
People have been Googling it, too. The search query "Bigfoot press conference" hit the top three on Google Trends.
"R.I.P. Harry. The Hendersons will miss you," one Twitter user said jokingly in reference to the '80s comedy Harry and the Hendersons, about a family that adopts a Bigfoot. Others were more skeptical, given the dubious nature of the photos. "That Bigfoot in the box looks so totally fakey, like a bad Halloween costume," another Twitter user said.
But most of the Twitter observers tuned into the press conference seemed to take the whole thing as entertainment. "I'm actually fearful to enter these Bigfoot infested woods in Georgia!" one exclaimed. "He's a Bigfoot dressed up as a Bigfoot, playing another Bigfoot," one wrote in a nod to a line spoken by Robert Downey Jr. in the just-released satire flick Tropic Thunder.
Most Twitterers didn't seem to believe the contents of the conference, probably because there were enough gray areas in the press conference to paint the walls of my office a nice foggy hue. Biscardi 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."
Plus, the Associated Press reported that Whitton and Dyer's story had changed, and in the press conference Whitton claimed that he and Dyer hadn't actually been veteran Bigfoot hunters as reported earlier. When they found the creature, they considered the idea of doing guided tours of Bigfoot country, but that was as far as they said they went.
"I didn't believe in Bigfoot at the time," Whitton said.
And if Twitter is to be believed, the Internet still doesn't.
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