Big Surprise: Sasquatch Corpse a Hoax...

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.

The Montauk...Raccoon...?

I'm a couple of days late here, but did anyone else see all the news play that "Montauk Monster" photo got on Friday? That was actually the first thing I saw when I woke up on Friday morning. (Seriously. I fell asleep watching CNN Thursday night.) The story behind it is that a dead monster washed ashore on a beach in Long Island and a lady took a pair of photographs of the carcass. (Without thinking to lay down anything next to the beast to establish any sense of scale, of course.) All of this apparently took place a couple of weeks ago and the story slowly gained traction in the local press before somehow breaking into the national news on Friday. CNN spent the whole day perseverating about it and by the end of the day I'd also seen the story on MSNBC, Fox, and, as always, Above Top Secret. More fuel was added to the fire when a group of young men claimed to have recovered the monster's corpse, noting breathlessly that "all the flesh just melted off into black goo" without paying much attention to the fact that, well, that's what happens to dead things.

Terrifying monster or just a dead varmint?

In any event, the "monster" is pretty weird looking, especially the "beak-like" bit at the tip of the snout. After looking at it for a while, it seemed to me like that was probably just an exposed bit of skull protruding through the flesh. I was leaning towards "dead dog" as an explanation, but without any sense of scale I couldn't say it with certainty. Plus the thing has kind of funny looking forelimbs. Soon, however, various folks, such as Animal Planet's Jeff Corwin, started noting that the thing looks kind of like a raccoon, and that explanation now seems to easily be the most robust. That assessment is strongly bolstered by the second picture of the "monster", a straight-on shot that has barely gotten any attention from the media. From this angle the "beak" disappears and it becomes pretty obvious that we're just plain looking at a dead coon.

The shot you didn't see: No beak, just a very dead raccoon.

What bugs me about this whole debacle really isn't a lady took a picture of some gross thing that washed up on the beach only to have a news story sprung up around it, it's that the news media had access to two pictures of the creature in question and elected to only publicize the one that looked bizarre. Watch the news report I linked to above and see how much they play up the whole "beak" angle in order to make the creature seem more mysterious. Anyone looking at the second picture would know in a second that the animal didn't have a beak, but much of the media neglected to mention that. Instead they decided to go with breathless gee-whiz journalism and turn an ordinary, if gross, pair of photos into a monster.

Faking it...

Well, I spent part of the weekend working on a new video regarding UFO photos. I've been inspired to this by "War of the Words - The True but Strange Story of the Gulf Breeze UFO" by Craig R. Myers. It's an interesting book, though it's hindered by the author's too frequent attempts at humor. Myers has a funny story to tell, mind you, but he overplays his hand a little. Still, anyone interested in learning more about one of the most well-known UFO hoaxes in recent memory will find his book worthwhile.

In any event, I've been inspired to fake my very own UFO pics, just to see if I can come up with something that looks halfway plausible. Some of this will be detailed in the upcoming video, but it's getting both harder and easier to fake a decent picture these days. It's easier because of fancy computer editing software that lets you layer multiple pictures together (Works great for ghosts too!). It's getting harder because you can't do a double exposure on a digital camera. It's also hard to take the classic out of focus half-assed shots that are the hallmark of UFO lore. Some of the easiest to do "practical" UFOs (as opposed to ones generated later by computer editing) only look good if the shot is kind of out of focus, and it's getting harder to shoot out of focus with a digital these days. There's one technique that worked like magic when I tried it out a few years ago with a Polaroid, but I had all kinds of trouble doing it over the weekend with a digital camera because the auto-focus was just plain working too well. (What a goofy complaint.)

Anyway, pending how long it takes me to get all the pictures I want and how lazy I feel about shooting the actual video itself, I should have another video up sometime in the next couple of weeks. Should be pretty fun.