Tom Biscardi, Sasquatch, and Silliness

Stop me if you've heard this one: Around this time last year, a couple of pranksters convinced the self-proclaimed "world's greatest Bigfoot hunter" Tom Biscardi that they had slayed a Sasquatch and had its carcass preserved in a deep freezer.¹ Ever the trusting soul, Biscardi hacked up an undisclosed (apparently large) sum of money to buy the corpse and called a huge press conference touting the "discovery" before actually bothering to examine it. Then, to absolutely no one's surprise but Biscardi's, the "corpse" proved to be a Halloween costume stuffed with animal entrails and the hoaxers disappeared with his cash.

So why the history lesson?

Well, Biscardi's back. This time he claims to have a Sasquatch toenail that he got from a guy named Larry Jenkins out in Arizona. Call me a cynic, but after the corpse thing last year and the Bigfoot webcam fiasco in 2005, he'd better have some damned convincing evidence this time.² Luckily the toenail has already been put through a battery of tests in an attempt to determine its origins. Even more luckily, Search For Bigfoot has an article up breathlessly describing the toenail and detailing an exchange between one of Biscardi's associates (referred to as "SL") and a nameless researcher from an unknown university who secretly ran the genetic tests on the nail.

Wait a second. Nameless researcher? Unknown university? Secret testing? That sounds more than a little sketchy, but for now we'll that slide and get to the meat of the matter: What did all these tests say? Unfortunately the article on the tests is a bit convoluted - Two Bigfoot hunters are writing about what was reported to them by this SL person, who was in contact with the folks from the mysterious University. Still, here's what was said about the magic toenail:

From the "1st response to SL from the university": The primate part seems to be right, but not the non-human part...it came back 99% homo sapien or human...

The original email from SL to the researcher doing the testing isn't posted, but the wording of the response is telling. I rather suspect the first e-mail from the Bigfoot folks might have gone a little something like "We found a nail that we think came from a non-human primate". Thus, the reply of "The primate part seems to be right, but not the non-human part..." seems to mean that "you're right that it's a primate nail, but not that it's non-human." I can't know that for sure, but that's certainly how it looks to me.

The SFB folks seem to read it differently, though: They assert that it means that the nail has 99% human DNA but 1% "non-human DNA". That's an odd reading of the text, and from it inexorably comes a leap of logic from the Bigfoot folks: "How many creatures are walking around the North American forest with 99% human DNA and 1% unknown primate? What else could it be..."

My interpretation and the SFB interpretation couldn't be more different. One means that Biscardi has once again been played for a sap, this time by a dude who mailed him a nasty old toenail, while the other means that (holy shit!) Bigfoot is real. It seems we're at a loggerheads. If only there was some kind of clarification available so we'd know what the 99% bit meant. Oh wait, there is:

From "the next correspondence from the University": What the 99% means is that we are confident to that percentage that it is human...³

From SL, reporting on an e-mail from the University that was not posted in its entirety: She [the researcher] said that the lab had also compared the nail to primate nail photos...[and] concluded it was likely human in origin.

That seems pretty open-and-shut, but the folks at Search For Bigfoot seem to have been reading different e-mails than the ones that they posted on their site. They claim towards the end of the article that "they [the researchers] have told us that the DNA and the physical properties of the nail indicate that it is not human."

WHAT?!?

The researchers said that they're 99% certain the nail is human! The genetic material taken from the nail, as well as its morphology compared to the nails of known non-human primates, led them to conclude that "it was likely of human origins". The lab itself, at least according to the e-mails posted, never says that the DNA is "99% human, 1% non-human". That was flatly made up by the Bigfoot hunters because, to all appearances, they can't freakin' read. They've somehow twisted "We're 99% sure it's human" into "it's 99% human and 1% monster". Amazing! Even more amazingly, the author of the article then tries to end with a zinger:

I guess "science" doesn't mean that much to scientists if it makes them question the work they've done in the past.

I think a better wrap-up would be that science doesn't mean that much to Sasquatch hunters with low reading comprehension.

1.) Remember?
2.) Take a look at the title of the article linked here. Apparently even the Bigfoot Field Researchers Organization thinks of Tom as a "notorious huckster".
3.) Italics mine.

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.

Bigfoot Hunters Allegedly Find Sasquatch Carcass...

Update: I've added an embedded picture of the "carcass" below the rest of the post because Cryptomundo and some of the other cryptozoology sites are getting so much traffic that they're crashing left and right.

I just finished watching that Yang Huei guy kick everyone else's ass in the men's all-round gymnastics competition, and I have to say that the last thing I expected to see upon hopping online to check the other Olympics results was this. Apparently a group of Sasquatch hunters claim to have a Bigfoot carcass, which they further claim to have just found out in the Georgia woods. The two men involved, policeman Matthew Whitton and one-time corrections officer Rick Dyer, are being backed up by Tom Biscardi, the guy out in California who runs Searching for Bigfoot, Inc. They'll be holding a press conference on Friday during which they say they'll produce the carcass and "DNA evidence" that will prove that it's a Sasquatch. (Biscardi is apparently a big name in Sasquatch hunting, at least according to the 3rd-person accolades about him on his website, but he's apparently not quite big enough to have his own Wikipedia page.)

Dyer and Whitton claim to have found the body several weeks ago after sighting numerous other Sasquatches milling about in the general area. Luckily they had a Sasquatch-sized ice chest (a deep freezer, I guess) at their disposal, and they've been keeping the carcass buried in ice ever since. It is perhaps worth noting that Whitton and Dyer also happen to own a company that sells Bigfoot expeditions, and further that they have announced plans to go capture one of the other Sasquatches alive, since they know where they all hang out now. That should be good.

Cyrptomundo.com has a bigger pic than the images on Searching for Bigfoot, but the site has been flooded with traffic and thus may be down at any given time. The picture is also available here. Honestly I'm not especially impressed with the picture and somehow I suspect that the "carcass" will not be made available for study, but I guess there'll be more to talk about on Friday. Two things of note - The first picture on Biscardi's site shows the body completely buried in ice, while the picture from Cryptomundo (a fancier version also released by Biscardi) shows the animal not only uncovered ("thawed") but completely dry, which seems a little off. Note that the fur is even dry enough to be wispy and sticking up. Secondly, that fur looks an awful lot to me like the fur on a gorilla costume, and I say that with some authority because I own a rather expensive one. Costume fur gets kind of a weird, bed-head sort of look that doesn't actually resemble ape hair all that much. My prediction is that this is either a stuffed costume or some combination of regular animal remains mixed with a healthy dose of contrivance. In any event, I think Friday should be pretty interesting, if not for the reasons Biscardi intends.

Oh, and Loren Coleman over at Cryptomundo, who penned the article I linked to above, has also pointed out this. Looks a little...familiar...


This is a picture of the supposed carcass. I believe that Tom Biscardi holds the copyright to it, but I've provided it here as a service for the curious.

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.

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.

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...?

Space Sasquatch!

A four year-old image from the Mars Spirit rover is making the rounds on the internet as showing a humanoid figure, possibly Space Bigfoot. It's garnering coverage on CNN TV and Fox's website, as well as Phil Plait's blog. Phil's of the opinion, which I share, that it's just a simulacrum or an optical illusion. Most of the major news outlets are getting a giggle out of it, but a quick google search indicates that some bloggers out there are missing the joke. In any event, this can't be a Space Sasquatch, because they have horns and carry axes.

(An FYI for the four people who aren't familiar with the term, a simulacrum, for our purposes, is a natural formation that resembles something else, such as the famous Old Man of the Mountain.)