As if the craptacular press conference last Friday left anyone with any doubts as to whether or not the Sasquatch corpse supposedly discovered in Georgia a few weeks ago was a crude hoax, a notice on Bigfoot hunter Tom Biscardi's website today confirmed that the carcass was a fake. This comes several days after the announcement that the DNA retrieved from the "body" was actually that of a possum. As I remarked in another post, the only thing open to question since Friday has been whether or not Biscardi himself was in on the deception. At this point it appears that he was not.
According to fellow Sasquatch enthusiast Steve Kull, who runs the Squatch Detective website and is the host of the radio show on which hoaxers Matthew Whitton and Rick Dyer made their original claims about having a Bigfoot corpse, Biscardi paid the pair of hucksters an "undisclosed sum" (read: lots) of money in advance of the press conference and examination of the "remains". Over the weekend Sasquatch researchers, working for Biscardi's Searching for Bigfoot Inc., thawed out the frozen "carcass" that Whitton and Dyer turned over to them, only to find that it was in reality...wait for it...a stuffed Bigfoot suit with some animal entrails on it. Both Biscardi and Kull reportedly took part in this examination, and I can only imagine the mood in the room when they discovered that the body was, as Kull put it, "a costume".
Since the (Bigfoot) shit has begun to hit the fan, Whitton and Dyer have dropped off the radar and taken Biscardi's money with them. Biscardi was apparently briefly in contact with them before they left California and, according to Kull, they owned up to the hoax and agreed to return the money Biscardi paid for the fake Bigfoot. To absolutely no one's surprise, Biscardi arrived at their hotel only to find that they had checked out and fled for parts unknown.
According to an article by Loren Coleman over at Cryptomundo, Biscardi embarked on a similar adventure in 2005 when he pre-sold numerous passes to view a pair of live Sasquatches that had allegedly been captured by "a woman in Nevada". It came out rather quickly that the animals were, in fact, not real. Biscardi has spent the last several years in a state of almost perpetual damage control because of the incident and now it looks as if he'll be spending the next several years doing about the same thing.
This incident is almost sad because Biscardi himself honestly seemed sincere in the press conference and apparently ponied up no small amount of his own money to secure the right to examine the "body". On the other hand, I think most of us with so much as an iota of critical thinking power recognized that corpse as a cheap Halloween costume within the first few minutes of seeing pictures of it...so how exactly is Biscardi one of the "world's top Bigfoot researchers" if he couldn't recognize it as such? Was he, perhaps, blinded to the obvious signs of deception by his own wishful thinking. I think we all know the answer to that one.
Embedded below is a Fox News clip in which one of Searching For Bigfoot Inc.'s members discusses the hoax.
Showing posts with label bigfoot. Show all posts
Showing posts with label bigfoot. Show all posts
Tuesday, August 19, 2008
Thursday, April 24, 2008
Local Flavor Pt. I: The Sasquatch In My Backyard...
Today I stumbled upon the website for the Bigfoot Field Researchers Organization and just for fun I went to their geographical database and looked for local Sasquatch attacks and whatnot. Turns out that there's a recorded Sasquatch event not only in my city, but in the very neighborhood where I grew up. Alas, it pre-dates me by 11 years or so, but according to the report, eerie Sasquatch calls where throughout my neighborhood during the summer of 1971. Now, this isn't a "sighting" mind you, since the guy reporting it didn't see anything, he just heard some spooky noises, -but- he's pretty sure it was a Sasquatch.
To give you an idea of the area we're talking about, Pleasure Ridge Park is, even in 2008, not entirely suburbs. A few blocks down from my parents' house is a set of yards chock full of horses and goats. As a child, my next door neighbors had a pony (with a penchant for escaping his enclosure and munching on my mom's plants), and the people across the street from us kept chickens until I was in middle school. Two sides of the neighborhood are cut off by a large flood ditch, which figures prominently in the report, and there are still woods there to this day. PRP isn't farmland by any stretch of the imagination, but it's a different sort of suburbs than most folks are used to.
One thing that I should point out that is not mentioned at all in this fellow's report is that PRP is also filled to the brim with dogs. At least every second house in the neighborhood has one or two of the things, and most of them run free at night. My childhood was terrorized by one such creature, a neighborhood Doberman named Adolf who was easily capable of clearing his owner's fence. Dogs account for most of the sounds you hear at night in Pleasure Ridge Park, with the rest accounted for by frogs and drunk folks.
While the fellow who reported the 1971 Sasquatch didn't manage to record the incident, he does say the the noise he heard was strikingly similar to this noise archived on the website. One thing of note is that there is a barking dog in the recording, along with what sounds, to me anyway, a lot like another dog lowing in the distance. I have to suspect, based on reading the report and the fellow recounting it noting that he had forgotten about the event until listening to the above recording, that maybe some of the details are being distorted through the lens of memory. There's a lot of scary noises at night when you're a 10 year-old kid (as the guy who submitting this "sighting" was when the event happened), but a scary noise does not a Sasquatch make.
To give you an idea of the area we're talking about, Pleasure Ridge Park is, even in 2008, not entirely suburbs. A few blocks down from my parents' house is a set of yards chock full of horses and goats. As a child, my next door neighbors had a pony (with a penchant for escaping his enclosure and munching on my mom's plants), and the people across the street from us kept chickens until I was in middle school. Two sides of the neighborhood are cut off by a large flood ditch, which figures prominently in the report, and there are still woods there to this day. PRP isn't farmland by any stretch of the imagination, but it's a different sort of suburbs than most folks are used to.
One thing that I should point out that is not mentioned at all in this fellow's report is that PRP is also filled to the brim with dogs. At least every second house in the neighborhood has one or two of the things, and most of them run free at night. My childhood was terrorized by one such creature, a neighborhood Doberman named Adolf who was easily capable of clearing his owner's fence. Dogs account for most of the sounds you hear at night in Pleasure Ridge Park, with the rest accounted for by frogs and drunk folks.
While the fellow who reported the 1971 Sasquatch didn't manage to record the incident, he does say the the noise he heard was strikingly similar to this noise archived on the website. One thing of note is that there is a barking dog in the recording, along with what sounds, to me anyway, a lot like another dog lowing in the distance. I have to suspect, based on reading the report and the fellow recounting it noting that he had forgotten about the event until listening to the above recording, that maybe some of the details are being distorted through the lens of memory. There's a lot of scary noises at night when you're a 10 year-old kid (as the guy who submitting this "sighting" was when the event happened), but a scary noise does not a Sasquatch make.
Wednesday, February 13, 2008
Of Sasquatch and Giant Squids...
Cyptozoologists, such as they are, point to two great "success stories" in their field - the coelacanth and the giant squid. The existence of these creatures, many say, grants a certain respectability to their field and gives credence to their tales of the Sasquatch and El Chupacabra. You see, cryptos look for new animals, sometimes new animals get discovered, ergo all postulated new creature must exist. Man, I guess I'd better go back and remove all my posts bashing the cryptos...
Wait, no, the logic behind that argument is pure bollocks. Let's have a closer look at the discoveries of these two beasts and see if they really mean what the cryptos say they mean.
The coelacanth (as an order of fish rather than what we specifically call a coelacanth today) was known to science for years in the form of fossils. The surprise was not so much that the coelacanth existed at all, but rather that they still exist. The discovery of the coelacanth is then more akin to, say, the discovery of a live thylacine than the discovery of a dragon. The coelacanth represents not the discovery of a creature unknown to science, but rather that discovery of a known creature previously thought to be extinct.
Likewise the giant squid. Strong circumstantial evidence of the giant squid has long existed. While some (many? most?) historical sightings of the beasts are likely apocryphal, evidence such as battle scars observed on sperm whales and the occasional washed up bit on a beach constituted a much stronger case for the giant squid than, say, Bigfoot. That would be akin to a Bigfoot researcher coming out of the woods covered in Sasquatch bites and carrying the beast's severed arm. (Shades of Beowulf and Grendel.) Zoologists and biologists, that is to say folks that are actually trained in research methodology rather than self-proclaimed experts like these guys, have seriously entertained the possibility of giant squids for years. The confirmation of the existence of these creatures a few years ago by a Japanese research team was no bolt from the blue - it was the culmination of decades of serious investigation.
What this means, of course, is that while cryptozoologists would like to claim these two beasts as victories, they're actually just two more points for the other team. An uncomfortable majority of cryptozoologists, like the folks at the Center for Fortean Zoology, only like to say they're doing science. Real science is boring, difficult, methodologically rigorous, and completely lacking the Indiana Jones style romance that a lot of cryptos would prefer. Real science brings in real discoveries, like the coelacanth, giant squid, and the (relatively) giant elephant shrew. Cryptozoology only gives us grainy Bigfoot photos, out of focus Loch Ness Monster videos, and an endless library of books in which this insular pseudo-discipline expounds endlessly upon itself. Oh, and that old show "Sightings", too.
Wait, no, the logic behind that argument is pure bollocks. Let's have a closer look at the discoveries of these two beasts and see if they really mean what the cryptos say they mean.
The coelacanth (as an order of fish rather than what we specifically call a coelacanth today) was known to science for years in the form of fossils. The surprise was not so much that the coelacanth existed at all, but rather that they still exist. The discovery of the coelacanth is then more akin to, say, the discovery of a live thylacine than the discovery of a dragon. The coelacanth represents not the discovery of a creature unknown to science, but rather that discovery of a known creature previously thought to be extinct.
Likewise the giant squid. Strong circumstantial evidence of the giant squid has long existed. While some (many? most?) historical sightings of the beasts are likely apocryphal, evidence such as battle scars observed on sperm whales and the occasional washed up bit on a beach constituted a much stronger case for the giant squid than, say, Bigfoot. That would be akin to a Bigfoot researcher coming out of the woods covered in Sasquatch bites and carrying the beast's severed arm. (Shades of Beowulf and Grendel.) Zoologists and biologists, that is to say folks that are actually trained in research methodology rather than self-proclaimed experts like these guys, have seriously entertained the possibility of giant squids for years. The confirmation of the existence of these creatures a few years ago by a Japanese research team was no bolt from the blue - it was the culmination of decades of serious investigation.
What this means, of course, is that while cryptozoologists would like to claim these two beasts as victories, they're actually just two more points for the other team. An uncomfortable majority of cryptozoologists, like the folks at the Center for Fortean Zoology, only like to say they're doing science. Real science is boring, difficult, methodologically rigorous, and completely lacking the Indiana Jones style romance that a lot of cryptos would prefer. Real science brings in real discoveries, like the coelacanth, giant squid, and the (relatively) giant elephant shrew. Cryptozoology only gives us grainy Bigfoot photos, out of focus Loch Ness Monster videos, and an endless library of books in which this insular pseudo-discipline expounds endlessly upon itself. Oh, and that old show "Sightings", too.
Wednesday, February 06, 2008
Look closely, Cryptos - Awesome new mammal discovered!
Elephant shrews are peculiar monsters, looking as if someone tried to draw a cross between an elephant and a deer and messed up. We have one at the Louisville Zoo and, along with its hyrax roommate, it comprises one of the zoo's more fascinating exhibits. Well, a new species of elephant shrew, a giant elephant shrew no less, has been discovered in Tanzania. Giant is a relative term here - the critter is around the size of a house cat- but this is still fascinating because it's pretty rare to see the discovery of a new kind of mammal. The article about the discovery is here, and I got the link from this thread on the Internet Infidels Discussion Board.
The point of this, I think, is to illustrate that science is still looking for new creatures, not resting on its laurels with its hands over its eyes as some cryptozoologists seem to think. Think about it for a moment- something as tiny and obscure as a new species of elephant shrew deep in the wilds of Tanzania has now been uncovered by a small team of dedicated scientific researchers, whereas all the pseudoscientists and would-be Indiana Jones-es out there have still yet to uncover solid evidence of the holy trinity of Sasquatch, the Loch Ness Monster, and El Chupacabra.
I wonder why...?
The point of this, I think, is to illustrate that science is still looking for new creatures, not resting on its laurels with its hands over its eyes as some cryptozoologists seem to think. Think about it for a moment- something as tiny and obscure as a new species of elephant shrew deep in the wilds of Tanzania has now been uncovered by a small team of dedicated scientific researchers, whereas all the pseudoscientists and would-be Indiana Jones-es out there have still yet to uncover solid evidence of the holy trinity of Sasquatch, the Loch Ness Monster, and El Chupacabra.
I wonder why...?
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