Aug 15, 2008 11:15 am US/Pacific
Ga. Men Present 'Proof' For Bigfoot Carcass Find
ATLANTA (AP) ―
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Matt Whitton and Rick Dyer say they stumbled across Bigfoot's corpse in the woods of northern Georgia. Here, someone holds up a photo of the alleged creature's mouth.
CBS
Two men claim they've bagged Bigfoot, and they say the have the hairy corpse of the legendary creature stored away in a freezer.
Matt Whitton and Rick Dyer say they stumbled across the corpse in the woods of northern Georgia, across the country from the remote regions of the Northwest where people usually claim to see the man-ape.
Still, the Georgia men say DNA will prove once and for all that the frozen creature is Sasquatch. They distributed DNA test results and photographs during a news conference Friday in Palo Alto, Calif.
They're not winning over any skeptics, though.
"What I've seen so far is not compelling in the least, and I think the pictures cast grave doubts on their claim," Jeffrey Meldrum, a Bigfoot researcher and Idaho State University professor, told the Scientific American. "It just looks like a costume with some fake guts thrown on top for effect."
Meldrum said the DNA test likely won't prove anything and, at best, might yield a gene sequence that doesn't match any other known primates.
Whitton, an officer on medical leave from the Clayton County Police Department, and Dyer, a former corrections officer, announced the discovery in early July.
The picture they sent out in a news release and on their Web site shows what appears to be a hairy corpse crammed into a chest freezer. The accompanying announcement describes the creature as a 7-foot-7 male, weighing 550 pounds with 16-inch human-like feet and reddish hair.
Messages left for Whitton and Dyer early Friday on their Bigfoot Tipline were not returned. They have so far offered three different tales so far about how they came to find the creature:
In one, the animal was shot by a former felon, and the men followed it into the woods. In a second version, they found a "family of Bigfoot" in North Georgia mountains. In the third, the two were hiking and stumbled upon the corpse with open wounds.
U.S. Fish and Wildlife Reserve spokesman Tom Mackenzie said officers also are not taking the claim seriously and will not investigate Bigfoot because it not a federal priority.
"It's not on endangered species on any list that we've got," Mackenzie said.
(© 2009 CBS Broadcasting Inc. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. The Associated Press contributed to this report.)
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