The Georgia Bigfoot Body Hoax

Bigfoot hunters have long wanted one thing above all. A body. In summer 2008, two men from Georgia said they had one. Matthew Whitton was a Clayton County, Georgia police officer, on medical leave at the time. Rick Dyer was a former Georgia corrections officer. In early July 2008 they went public with YouTube videos and a website. On 12 August 2008 the claim reached Steve Kulls's Squatch Detective radio show.

The men said they found the body in June 2008, while hiking in the north Georgia mountains. They described a male, 7-foot-7 tall. Most reports gave its weight as 500 lb. The AP announcement said 550 lb. It had reddish hair and 16-inch human-like feet. ABC News reported it as half-human, half-ape.

They were not alone in the woods, they said. According to ABC News, the men saw "three other live creatures while carting the corpse away." By another account it took a day and a half and six men to carry the body out, followed all the while by other Bigfoot creatures. None of the six was ever named. Dyer said they froze the body "to slow rigor mortis."

The story did not stay still. The AP reported three versions. In one, a former felon shot the animal and the men followed it into the woods. In another, they came upon a family of Bigfoot. In the third, they simply found the body while hiking.

15 August 2008. Palo Alto, California. Whitton and Dyer stood beside Tom Biscardi, a Bigfoot hunter, former Las Vegas promoter and head of Searching for Bigfoot Inc. They showed two blurry photos of the body in a freezer. Biscardi was moved. "I touched it, I measured its feet, I felt its intestines," he said. "Be still my heart, I felt bad for the poor thing."

Others were less sure. Jeff Meldrum said it looked like "a waterlogged costume that's been stuffed into a freezer." Matt Moneymaker of the BFRO called it "a Halloween costume in a box." Loren Coleman put it at "99 percent a hoax and 1 percent a probability of reality."

The next weekend, Searching for Bigfoot thawed the block of ice. Steve Kulls was there. The head was unusually hollow in one small section. A hair sample, when burned, melted into a ball uncharacteristic of hair. Kulls reached into a break near the feet and confirmed it was a rubber foot. DNA work by Curt Nelson at the University of Minnesota had returned one human sample, one "96 percent" opossum and a third that was inconclusive. Biscardi suggested the creature had eaten an opossum.

Over that weekend both men admitted the hoax. Later they called it "a big joke" that got out of hand. Clayton County Police Chief Jeff Turner moved to fire Whitton. "He has violated the duty of a police officer," he said.

Money had changed hands. A reported $50,000, though who paid it is still disputed. Biscardi said only, "We paid them the money the night before." Whether he was a dupe or the mastermind remains an open question.

The case echoes the Minnesota Iceman of 1968, another frozen, hair-covered body exhibited to the public. Dyer later claimed he shot a Bigfoot near San Antonio, Texas, in September 2012, and toured a body he called "Hank." On 28 March 2014 he admitted on Facebook that it was also a hoax.