Somebody saw this coming. In July 2008, weeks before anybody held a press conference, an anonymous letter reached federal wildlife officials about a creature two Georgia men were showing off online. According to the Associated Press, it said the thing was "the remains of a small gorilla or chimpanzee that may have undergone some taxidermy treatment."
That turned out to be generous.
Two men and a tip line
Matt Whitton was a Clayton County police officer, on medical leave since July 3 after being shot in the wrist. Rick Dyer was a former Georgia corrections officer. In early July they announced on YouTube and on their website that they had found Bigfoot. Their release described a male, 7 feet 7 inches tall and 550 pounds, with reddish hair and 16-inch human-like feet. The accompanying photo showed something hairy crammed into a chest freezer.
As for how they found him, the AP counted three versions. In the early videos, a former felon shot the animal and the two men followed it into the woods. In the second, they came across a "family of Bigfoot" in the north Georgia mountains. In the third, they were out hiking and stumbled onto a corpse with open wounds. Dyer later said they froze the body to stave off rigor mortis, a sentence we have now read several times.
There were signs for anyone who cared to look. The website sold weekend Bigfoot expeditions in the north Georgia mountains for $499. In one YouTube video the pair held a stuffed bear up to the camera and repeated their claims. The voicemail on their Bigfoot tip line announced that they were also looking for leprechauns and the Loch Ness monster, and Fox News later reported that the site's hotline wanted tips on unicorns, dinosaurs, Jimmy Hoffa and Elvis.
Dyer explained their next move to ABC News with some candor. "We started to tell people the week after we found the body, but no one believed us," he said. "So we started to make fun of the Bigfoot trackers, and that got attention." It got them onto the Squatch Detective radio show, where the host pressed them to let somebody verify the body. They asked for Tom Biscardi. "You type in 'Bigfoot' and that's the name that comes up," Dyer said.
Biscardi was a former Las Vegas promoter based in Menlo Park, California, and the head of Searching for Bigfoot, Inc. In 2005 he had claimed to have captured a Sasquatch, which never materialized, and he said he'd been swindled by a deranged attention-seeker. "He does not carry a reputation of credibility," Idaho State anatomist Jeffrey Meldrum said. Biscardi flew to Georgia to see the body, and he came away moved. "Be still my heart, I felt bad for the poor thing," he told ABC.
Palo Alto
The press conference happened on August 15, 2008, in a crowded hotel room in Palo Alto. Whitton wore a torn T-shirt and a cap reading "Best trackers in the world." Finding the creature, he said, was "like finding the biggest diamond in the world." Biscardi promised reporters a close-up "to prove to you people that this is not a mask."
Nobody brought a body, or any piece of one. Reporters got two blurry photos, one of a mouth and one of a figure in the woods, and an email from a University of Minnesota researcher named Curtis Nelson, whom the AP identified as an entomologist. Nelson had looked at three samples. Most of the DNA segments in two of them matched human, and the third was a likely match for an American opossum. Biscardi suggested the opossum came from a stomach sample, as in lunch. He did not explain why he had a stomach sample. Nelson had already told ABC what he thought the real test was: "If the guy claims to have a body, he really should produce one."
The men wouldn't say where in north Georgia they'd been, because they were concerned about an endangered species. Over at the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, a spokesman told the AP the agency wouldn't be investigating. "It's not on endangered species on any list that we've got," he said.
The Bigfoot world was harsher than the press. "Discovery? It's a hoax. It's a Halloween costume in a box," said Matt Moneymaker, founder of the Bigfoot Field Researchers Organization, before anyone had thawed anything. Cryptozoology writer Loren Coleman looked at the teeth and said they "could be my late mother's false teeth." An online Halloween retailer told Fox News, after seeing the photos, "It definitely looks like our costume." And when a reporter asked Biscardi how much money he expected to make from all this, he gave perhaps the only fully reliable statement of the afternoon: "As much as I possibly can."
A rubber foot
Biscardi had paid the two men the night before. "A substantial amount of money" was all he would say, from unnamed investors. Fox News reported internet rumors of $50,000, a figure he wouldn't confirm when asked.
The body, meanwhile, wasn't in the Georgia woods anymore. The secret location was apparently Muncie, Indiana. On Saturday, the day after the press conference, Biscardi's investigator, a self-described Sasquatch detective named Steve Kulls, got to the freezer with a group of investigators. Kulls also hosted Squatchdetective Radio, the show that had pressed the pair to let somebody verify the body. He was now the somebody. According to the statement he later posted, the group estimated the contents weighed over 1,500 pounds and would take several days or longer to thaw, so they called it a night.
The next day they pulled off some hair as the ice melted and set it on fire. It "melted into a ball uncharacteristic of hair," Kulls wrote. He called Biscardi, who told him to speed things up. Scientific American's account of the statement says heat lamps. Biscardi's own telling had more swagger: "They didn't figure I'd have a turbo heater on that thing to thaw it out before they left California."
Within an hour they could reach the head, which felt "mostly firm, but unusually hollow in one small section." About an hour after that, a break appeared near the feet. Then came the sentence that ended it, and we admire its economy: "I observed the foot which looked unnatural, reached in and confirmed it was a rubber foot."
Biscardi phoned Whitton and Dyer at their California hotel. According to Kulls's statement, they admitted it was a costume and agreed to sign a promissory note at an 8 a.m. meeting. When Biscardi arrived, he "found that they had left." Kulls added, for the record, that they were "not the best Bigfoot trackers in the world," which by then wasn't in much dispute.
What came out of the ice was a rubber gorilla suit, stuffed with what TIME described as roadkill and other animal remains. Biscardi called it "the most macabre thing you've ever seen in your life." He also said a donkey tongue had been placed on the mouth of the costume to make it look authentic. Remember the blurry close-up of the mouth, the one with the tongue and teeth? We can't prove that's the same tongue, but we did think about it for a while.
"Because this is Bigfoot"
The part of this that isn't funny belongs to Clayton County. Police Chief Jeff Turner had known a different Matt Whitton. "He was a real go-getter," he told Fox News. Whitton had been wounded that summer while apprehending a suspect who had allegedly shot a woman in the head. Turner couldn't explain what had happened and processed the paperwork to fire him anyway. "Once he perpetrated a fraud, that goes into his credibility and integrity," he said.
The two men surfaced back in Georgia within days and told Atlanta TV stations it was a joke that got out of hand. They admitted buying the suit over the internet and showed a reporter the web page selling it. "It started off as just some YouTube videos and a Web site," Whitton said. Dyer told one station he'd just wanted to put out some good news: "what's so bad about Bigfoot? Nobody got hurt." He also told a CNN affiliate, "Everyone knew we were lying." Whoever put up that money might quibble.
Whitton's defense of his own reputation deserves to be read in full. "I don't believe it does affect my credibility at all, because this is Bigfoot," he said. "It would be one thing if I came out and said I had something else that is tangible or real, but right now, as far as I'm concerned, there is no real Bigfoot."
Then everyone turned on everyone. Biscardi said he'd been victimized and that attorneys would go after the money, plus damages and a public apology. Dyer and Whitton hired a prominent defense lawyer and briefly posted a video arguing that Biscardi knew all along. The Bigfoot Field Researchers Organization posted a demand for warrants, aimed at Biscardi among others. Kulls broke with Biscardi, while writing that he honestly believed Biscardi wasn't in on it. Stanford anthropologist Richard Klein, one of the scientists Biscardi had said would examine the body, told a news network nobody had contacted him and that he was "sorry that my name and Stanford's name have been brought into this." Chief Turner offered the driest legal analysis: Biscardi "freely gave them the money," so "It'd be a civil matter." We couldn't find how any of it ended.
Hank
You'd think that would end Rick Dyer's Bigfoot career. Instead, in January 2014 he came back with a body, saying he'd shot it in September 2012 in woods near Loop 1604 and Highway 151, on the northwest side of San Antonio. The secret, he said, was Walmart pork ribs nailed to a tree. A lab in Washington state had run every test imaginable, he said. "It is the real deal."
He called it Hank and took it on the road at $10 a look for adults. In San Antonio, KSAT reported, the viewing was a rented trailer in a Home Depot parking lot. A sold-out night at the Alamo Drafthouse promised a Bigfoot documentary and a question-and-answer session. The San Antonio Current reported that the documentary never appeared, that the audience got Harry and the Hendersons instead, and that most of them walked out.
Hank was latex, foam and camel hair, made to order by a Washington state company. Dyer and his spokesman, Andrew Clacy, fell out in Daytona, where Clacy says Dyer admitted the body wasn't real. Dyer then posted a confession on Facebook and said the tour had taken in about $60,000. "Coming clean about everything is necessary for a new start," he wrote. "From this moment on, I will speak the truth!" Snopes reported that he still maintained he had shot a real Bigfoot, and just hadn't toured the real body because it would be stolen.
He had an explanation for the first time around, too. "When I hoaxed in 2008, I did not believe in Bigfoot," he told KSAT. "I thought Bigfoot was the same thing as a tooth fairy or a unicorn." The time he'd spent in the woods since, he said, had made a believer of him.
Georgia kept the Bigfoot anyway
North Georgia did get a real Bigfoot attraction, a little more than seven years after the freezer. David and Malinda Bakara opened Expedition: Bigfoot! The Sasquatch Museum in Cherry Log in early 2016, in a former BYOB supper club on Highway 515. We found no tie to the hoax. If there's a connection at all it runs the other way, since the AP describes David Bakara as a longtime member of the same Bigfoot Field Researchers Organization whose founder called the freezer a costume in a box.
Bakara told the AP he wanted to combine what he knew as a researcher with being a huge Disney World fan. So when the AP came through in 2019, instead of Space Mountain it found a display of Bigfoot laying siege to a remote cabin, with a hatchet-wielding mannequin trying to bar the door as two hairy paws came over the top. It also found plaster footprint casts, an 8-foot replica and a glass case said to hold feces from a Sasquatch in Oregon. We take no position on the feces.
The AP found him "displaying nothing but sincerity." "Every single bit of it is science," he told Blue Ridge Country magazine. That story describes a wall map with pins for sightings reported by people who walked in, many of them in the Chattahoochee National Forest, which is also the forest around Helen. The AP reported about 50,000 visitors a year in 2019, and most of them, Bakara said, treat the place with respect while they're on the grounds.
Not all of them. The AP also reported a guestbook entry from someone signing as "Bigfoot," home listed as "Woods." Under "How did you hear about us," the visitor wrote: "People were taking my picture."
