The AP reports from Bhutan:
“The creature has always been out there, and it’s out there still,” says Sonam Dorji, 77, sitting on the pockmarked wooden floor of his small farmhouse…His son-in-law, listening to the old man’s stories, laughs dismissively from across the room…”There’s nothing out there in the forest. Any educated person today knows this.”
…”We can’t live today like we did in the 17th or 18th century. Our culture has to be dynamic,” says Khandu Wangchuck, Bhutan’s finance minister. “Within the last 40 years, we’ve jumped 300-400 years.”
And the yeti? Wangchuck pauses. “I think most people today know this is just a story.”
Meanwhile, in the USA:
Hunters in northern Georgia, claiming to have found Bigfoot and stored him in a freezer, are promising to release telling pictures and DNA evidence of the creature.
…Matthew Whitton and Rick Dyer plan to fly to Palo Alto, Calif., and unveil proof of their discovery at a noon press conference this Friday at the Cabana Hotel, according to a report by Searching for Bigfoot Inc. The event will be open to members of the news media only.
A photograph of some kind of dead ape in a chest freezer is provided.
The story in fact first appeared in July in the Fayette Daily News, and was noted by the Bigfoot Researchers’ Lunch Club. Details in this earlier account are not encouraging:
…In one video, posted online by “RDYER678,” Whitton and Dyer interview a “pathologist” who is shocked at the Bigfoot, but then, in a follow-up video, the pair admits the “doctor of pathology” is actually Whitton’s brother. Standing in a kitchen, Whitton’s brother says to the camera, “Live and let live. What happened to that? Guys just trying to have a little fun, you know?”
Dyer said the claims are not a prank, though, and not just an attempt to have fun. Reached on his cell phone Tuesday, he insisted the body is real and will be unveiled on Sept. 1 on the web site
“Why would we jeopardize Matt’s job? Why would we risk the embarrassment of the backlash that we would get? We just have a lot to lose if this is a hoax … I thought Bigfoot trackers and hunters were ridiculous and I made fun of them, to be honest, and I still do. They know nothing as fact. We do,” Dyer said.
Dyer said the Internet announcement and the obvious lie were meant to draw detractors and “build hype.” Other Bigfoot researchers were dismissed by Dyer, and he said he and Whitton are the best trackers because they “have a body.”
…Dyer said he and Whitton plan to sell the Bigfoot body and make a lot of money.
“As of right now,” he said, “we’ve been offered a million bucks for it, from a very credible source. But we’ll make 10 times that. This will change history forever.”
The alleged discovery comes just a few months after the publication of a paper by Matthew Bowman in the Journal of Mormon History, entitled “A Mormon Bigfoot: David Patten’s Cain and the Concept of Evil in LDS Folklore”. Patten claimed to have encountered a very hairy person in 1835, and that this was none other than Cain, from the Bible:
As I was riding along the road on my mule I suddenly noticed a very strange personage walking beside me… His head was about even with my shoulders as I sat in my saddle. He wore no clothing, but was covered with hair. His skin was very dark. I asked him where he dwelt and he replied that he had no home, that he was a wanderer in the earth and traveled to and fro. He said he was a very miserable creature, that he had earnestly sought death during his sojourn upon the earth, but that he could not die, and his mission was to destroy the souls of men. About the time he expressed himself thus, I rebuked him in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and by virtue of the Holy Priesthood, and commanded him to go hence, and he immediately departed out of my sight…
UPDATE: The London Times reports:
An American police officer who claimed to have found Bigfoot has been fired from the force after it emerged that the hairy heap in his freezer was not the half-man, half-ape of myth, but a full-length rubber gorilla costume.
…”As soon as we saw it was a hoax, I filed the paperwork to terminate his employment,” said Chief [Jeffrey] Turner.
“He’s disgraced himself, he’s an embarrassment to the Clayton County Police Department, his credibility and integrity as an officer is gone, and I have no use for him,” he declared.
Filed under: Uncategorized | 1 Comment »
