Bigfoot theory rears its fuzzy head again

Bigfoot or big, fat lie?

Whenever someone reports seeing the hairy beast (details are always fuzzy) or capturing it on film (images always grainy), the news scares up a dubious debate of international proportions. Friday was just the latest episode in the sasquatch show.

Two men who say they stumbled across a Bigfoot corpse in the woods of northern Georgia indignantly stood by their story at a news conference in Palo Alto during which they offered an e-mail from a scientist as evidence and acknowledged that they wouldn’t mind making a few bucks from the “find” they kept in a freezer for more than a month.

“Everyone who has talked down to us is going to eat their words,” predicted Matt Whitton, an officer on medical leave from the Clayton County Police Department.

Whitton and Rick Dyer, a former corrections officer, announced the discovery in early July on YouTube videos and their website.

As they faced a skeptical audience of several hundred journalists and Bigfoot fans -- including one curiosity seeker in a Chewbacca suit -- the pair were joined by Tom Biscardi, head of a group called Searching for Bigfoot. Some Bigfoot hunters say Biscardi just likes attention.

Biscardi fielded most of the questions. Among them: Why should anyone accept the men’s tale when they weren’t willing to display their frozen artifact or pinpoint where they supposedly found it? How come bushwhackers aren’t constantly tripping over primate remains if there are as many as 7,000 Bigfoots roaming the United States, as Biscardi claimed?

“I understand where you are coming from, but how many real Bigfoot researchers are out there trekking 140,000 miles a year?” Biscardi said.

Biscardi, Whitton and Dyer presented what they called evidence supporting their theory. It was an e-mail from a University of Minnesota scientist, but all it said was that of the three DNA samples sent to the scientist, one was human, one probably came from a possum and the third could not be tested because of technical problems.