The Happy Camp "Captured Bigfoot" Claim

Happy Camp sits in Siskiyou County, California, a town that has long worn Bigfoot as part of its identity. In late June 2005, a press release announced that Tom Biscardi, a Bigfoot promoter from Las Vegas, would investigate "a cavernous area near Happy Camp" after "two very recent sightings from very credible witnesses." Biscardi ran the Great American Bigfoot Research Organization and a paid web service, findingbigfoot.com. At JavaBobs Bigfoot Deli, a clearinghouse for local sightings, owner Bob Schmalzbach joined the search.

July 13, 2005. Biscardi came to Happy Camp to follow up the reports. The next day, on the overnight radio show Coast to Coast AM, he said he was "98% sure" of a capture. He spoke of a resident Bigfoot's "lair." He said "two creatures living in the area" were behind recent sightings, at least two of them by motorists on Highway 96. The terrain, he said, was "mosquito infested areas, you know, 104-degree temperature."

By August 13 it had become a 90-day expedition. A 16-member crew. Three cameras running around the clock. Subscribers paid $14.95 for 7 days or $59.95 for 90 days, and Biscardi claimed over 40,000 of them. The fine print said the service "does not guarantee that you will personally witness a Bigfoot encounter."

August 19, 2005. A Friday. Back on Coast to Coast AM with host George Noory, Biscardi said a Bigfoot was "in captivity" in "a compound." He was relaying what he had been told.

"The Bigfoot is 8 feet, 400 lbs., male, mosquito bites, wounds." The doctors "have nursed him back." "It's been communicating," he said. "He communicates through giving back dishes that had food on them."

He promised film that night and a public unveiling on Monday. Noory put the stakes plainly. "You'll either be an international hero or a goat."

The film never came. On August 23 Biscardi apologised on the same show. His source, he said, was an acquaintance of his colleague Peggy Marx, a woman living in Stagecoach, Nevada. Her story of an injured Bigfoot cared for by two veterinarians had fallen apart as he checked it. He had been hoodwinked.

Noory pressed for refunds, and they were offered to people who had subscribed after the August 19 broadcast. Oddly, the show's own log for August 19 does not list Biscardi at all. The captive was never placed at Happy Camp. Loren Coleman was quoted as saying the creature had been held for over a week and that Biscardi never got to see it. No one on record ever did.

Doubts came early. Before the capture claim, British Columbia researcher John Green called the venture "the phoniest thing I've ever heard of in my life," pointing to Biscardi's links with Ivan Marx. In 2008, in Scientific American, Erik Vance reported Biscardi's description of the Stagecoach woman as "a deranged attention-seeker." A skeptic blog that year said it was "not clear… the extent to which Biscardi was in on the hoax." Perpetrator or victim, the sources never settle it. The plain explanation is that the captive was a false second-hand story. No animal ever existed to be identified.

In 2008 Biscardi was back in the headlines as buyer and promoter of the Georgia "Bigfoot body in a freezer," revealed as a rubber gorilla suit. The 2005 episode was recapped across that coverage. Happy Camp kept its Bigfoot Jamboree, its Bigfoot Scenic Byway and an 18-foot recycled-metal Bigfoot statue.