Why is it that strange sightings are always reported in the South? From ghosts to UFOs, the Southern states seem to have more than their fair share of supernatural occurrences. It should come as no surprise then, that two Georgia men have captured pictures of a hairy humanoid-type creature they claim to be Bigfoot.
So the story goes, the two men wandered upon the corpse of a Sasquatch-like creature in the forests of North Georgia. Bizarrely, the men say they have kept the remains of the Bigfoot in a freezer for more than a month now.
One of the men, Matt Whitten, is an officer from the Clayton County Police Department in Georgia, currently off on medical leave. At a news conference announcing the find in Palo Alto California, Clayton indignantly said, “everyone who has talked down to us is going to eat their words.”
Rick Dyer, the other man involved in the sighting, is a former correctional institution officer. The two men first announced the discovery of the supposed Bigfoot carcass back in July, and have posted videos on YouTube that claim to offer proof of their claim.
Neither of the two men claimed to be dedicated Bigfoot spotters; though the two have since set up search expeditions in the North Georgia woods, charging $499 a ticket to retrace their steps through the forest, in hopes of spotting another Sasquatch.
The men claim that the creature they bagged and took home to freeze was just one of several Bigfoot-looking animals they witnessed running through the forest. But at the press conference, journalists were less than impressed with the evidence offered.
Among the skeptical questions received, many journalists asked why the two men were unwilling to reveal the frozen Bigfoot carcass, or allow the artifact to be examined by scientists. Even some dedicated Bigfoot researchers were unreceptive to the claims by the Georgia men. Jeffrey Meldrum, an anthropologist from Idaho State University and a dedicated Bigfoot tracker, said the evidence presented was “not compelling in the least.”
The men showed photographs of the supposed Bigfoot corpse to journalists and scientists at the press briefing, but in an interview with The Scientific American, Meldrum claimed the images looked more like “a costume with some fake guts thrown on top for effect.”
In one YouTube video, the two men are shown speaking to an individual identified as a scientist about the Bigfoot finding. But this week, under pressure from journalists, the men were forced to admit that the man was actually Rick Dyer’s brother.
Still, they are holding to their story, and adamantly deny that the photographs were staged in any way. Dyer suggested that skeptics of the find are simply “jealous.”
