The San Antonio Bigfoot Shooting and the Hank Hoax

Rick Dyer ran BigfootTracker.com and called himself a master tracker. He told KSAT he had been on 90 expeditions over four years. "Bigfoot is 100 percent real. There's no question about that."

Homeless people told him Bigfoots were living in woods near Loop 1604 and Highway 151, on the northwest side of San Antonio. The spot had a history. In November 2009 a homeless woman reported a creature taking a deer carcass there. It screamed, she said. It screeched.

Early September 2012. Dyer camped in those woods, with a British documentary crew led by Morgan Matthews. "I nailed ... pork ribs from the WalMart down the street to the side of the tree, and low and behold, he came and started eating the pork ribs off the tree." Caught off guard, he could only grab his cellphone. The result was a short clip of the beast just outside his tent.

"We nailed 'em all around the trees, and then that night we heard Bigfoot come back." This time Dyer grabbed a rifle. By one account he chased the creature down and shot it three times, while another Bigfoot attacked Matthews and bloodied his face. His team later described a male, 7 ft 10 in and 754 lb, with dark tan skin and brownish red hair. Dyer said he rented a truck and moved the body to an undisclosed location outside Las Vegas.

KSAT broke the story on February 15, 2013. That April, Shooting Bigfoot premiered at Hot Docs in Toronto. Its finale is a torch-lit chase through the trees. Reviewers suspected the hunters were conspiring to trick Matthews. The director left the question open.

January 2014. Dyer released photos of the body. He called it Hank. DNA tests, 3D optical scans, body scans, he said. "It is the real deal." In February and March he toured it in a wooden coffin under Plexiglas. In San Antonio the promised documentary and Q&A never happened. Ticket holders were reportedly shown Harry and the Hendersons instead.

March 28, 2014. After a falling-out with his tour spokesman, Andrew Clacy, Dyer posted on Facebook: "Coming clean about everything is necessary for a new start!" Clacy said Dyer had already admitted to him in Daytona that Hank was a construct. Spokane costume maker Chris Russell of Twisted Toy Box confirmed he built it from latex, foam and camel hair. Dyer had told him it was for a movie about a guy who shot Bigfoot.

Idaho State University anthropologist Jeffrey Meldrum was blunt. "The thing has clearly been fabricated to depict a specimen that has been dissected. It smacks of images of alien autopsy." Benjamin Radford warned that the biggest threat to Bigfoot researchers came from "those who provide an endless stream of bogus claims and evidence." A Change.org petition asked the Department of Justice to charge Dyer with fraud. No outcome is recorded.

Dyer had done this before. In 2008 he and Matthew Whitton announced a frozen Georgia Bigfoot with Tom Biscardi. It was a rubber ape costume. Yet Dyer still says the 2012 shooting was real, and that Hank only replaced a genuine body that was confiscated. His earnings remain disputed, from his own "over $60,000" to close to $500,000.

The case now sits in the Museum of Hoaxes, run by Alex Boese, and among the documented Bigfoot hoaxes, a successor to the touring Minnesota Iceman of 1968.