According to a recent eTrucker.com poll that probed truckers’ experience of the supernatural, 5 percent of drivers reported having at one time or other seen a “Bigfoot” out on the road. In July, Clayton County, Georgia, sheriff’s deputy Matthew Whitton was shot in the wrist while pursuing a suspect into a wooded area after said suspect robbed a Krystal burger joint, according to the Atlanta Journal Constitution. A month later, Whitton was back in the news claiming with Ricky Dyer that they’d found a dead Bigfoot in North Georgia. While Dave Shealy, owner of an Ochopee, Fla., campground and well-known promoter of Florida’s answer to the Sasquatch, the Skunk Ape, claimed the picture they’d taken of a halloween costume and animal entrails thawing in a freezer was probably one of the furry, stinky Florida creatures on the northern end of its range, many cryptozoologists saw Whitton’s association with Tom Biscardi as giving away the very fact of the hoax from the start. The folks at the Bigfoot Field Researchers’ Organization say Whitton and company had only recently failed at marketing themselves as bigfoot trackers in Georgia, and Biscardi was attempting to cash in by selling copies of the photograph and other items. However, according to Whitton and Dyer’s site, bigfoottracker.com, Biscardi is now suing them.
pThe hoaxers’ press conference was held Friday, August 15, in Menlo Park, California, where they’d promised to deliver evidence, but of course didn’t (you can view it here: http://www.king5.com/video/index.html?nvid=273241, but beware, it’s 43 minutes long). /p
