Bigfoot Found?

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SeriouslyThug

SeriouslyThug

Sicc OG
#6
Jan 31, 2008
2,764
3,359
113
44
#6
http://www.ajc.com/traffic/content/metro/clayton/stories/2008/08/19/bigfoot_hoax.html

Bigfoot’s body a hoax, California site reveals
And the Clayton County Police officer has lost his job
By BOB KEEFE

Cox News Service

Tuesday, August 19, 2008

Can you believe it? Georgia’s “Bigfoot” was just a big hoax.

The body of a supposed ape-man found in the North Georgia mountains was nothing but an empty rubber monkey suit embedded in ice, according to California Bigfoot enthusiasts who finally got a chance to examine it last weekend.

• Photos: Georgia's not-so-proud moments
• Cop's Bigfoot sighting has roots in Georgia lore

Recent headlines:


Road-rage death of Iraq veteran ends in mistrial
Bigfoot's body a hoax, California site reveals
Former Georgia Tech worker gets 2.6 years for purchases
• Metro and state news [Post a comment on this story below.]

The two Atlanta men who stood up at a news conference in California last week and tried to convince the world they had found Bigfoot now apparently can’t be located — just like the real Bigfoot.

Calls to Matthew Whitton, a Clayton County police officer — make that former police officer — and his car salesman buddy Rick Dyer weren’t returned Tuesday.

The answering machine on a “tip line” connected to the pair’s Web site, which still advertises $499 Bigfoot “expeditions,” says they’re still out searching for Sasquatch — as well as leprechauns, dinosaurs, unicorns, Jimmy Hoffa and Elvis.

Searching for Bigfoot Inc., the California outfit that paid an undisclosed sum to Whitton and Dyer for rights to their story and their find, says the pair checked out of the hotel where they had been put up over the weekend.

According to a news release on Searching for Bigfoot’s Web site, the whole scam unraveled when a block of ice containing the “body” melted over the weekend. Whitton and Dyer later confessed that it was just a costume, according to the release.

Why the two Georgians contrived the cross-country con isn’t clear.

What is certain is that Whitton, 28, on medical leave after being shot in the wrist by a robbery suspect earlier this year, won’t be going back to work at the Clayton County Police Department.

As soon as he heard Whitton’s Bigfoot was a big fake, “I terminated him,” said Police Chief Jeffrey Turner said Tuesday.

“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,” Turner said. “His behavior is unbecoming of that of a police officer.”

“This turn of events from hero to someone who defrauds a nation is just baffling. I don’t know how he got from one point to the other,” Turner said.

The chief said he wants to send Whitton his termination paperwork and get his uniforms back. However, he said, “We haven’t been able to get in touch with him.”


Kathy Jefcoats of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution contributed to this article.
 
F

Fucky McFuckerson

Sicc OG
#7
May 9, 2002
37,066
16,282
113
#7
^^^

Imagine that.

Here is some background about the trackers and how the hoax got started. Talk about PWNED.

NOTE: All the underlined text below are LINKS to thing like YouTube videos, etc.

The Georgia Bigfoot Body Hoax all started with a web site created by two guys in Georgia calling themselves the "Georgia Bigfoot Trackers." Their site is www.bigfoottracker.com

Their full names are Matthew Gary Whitton and Ricky Traylor Chuck Dyer.

Whitton is a sheriff deputy of 6 years. Dyer is a transient, used car salesman. Dyer has had 14 different residences in the past 6 six years. He never worked as a prison guard, nor did he serve as an Army Ranger, as he has been claiming.

No one in the bigfoot research community had ever heard of these two guys before, and vice versa. But they put up a web site wherein they claimed to be the "best bigfoot trackers in the world".

It was strange.

They obviously hadn't been following the subject for long, because, for example, they had never heard of Jeff Meldrum ... the prominent expert who had appeared on numerous TV shows talking about the subject.

In the beginning they did not claim to have a body. In fact, they made it clear that they had nothing, but they said they would try to capture one.

They put out clownish YouTube videos offering to take people on bigfoot expeditions. They were obviously aware of the popularity of BFRO organized expeditions, some of which have taken place in Northern Georgia in the past.

Initially they claimed to be very well equipped and experienced at organizing bigfoot expeditions, but they later admitted that they had never previously participated in one.

Click here to see one of their first YouTube videos ... before they claimed to have a dead body.

Their YouTube videos were so foolish that many wondered whether these videos were intended as a joke ... but they weren't. These guys wanted to be taken seriously, and they wanted people to pay them $499 to attend their expeditions in Georgia. But no one was interested, and no one signed up, and no expedition ever occurred. Their little scam was a flop.

We ignored it, knowing they would never be taken seriously. We assumed these clowns would quickly fade away.

A week later Whitton was shown on the local TV news stations around Atlanta ... He had shot himself in the wrist with his own weapon while pursuing a suspect. This strange clown Whitton was indeed a Clayton County Sheriff deputy.

Various legitimate bigfoot researchers in Georgia were appalled by the whole situation and challenged these two guys about their claims. It was offensive that a sheriff deputy would be involved in such a ludicrous fraud. One Georgia researcher pointed out that they didn't have any experience or any evidence of anything. He sarcastically asked Dyer by phone "So do you have corpse or something?"

That gave Dyer and idea. After that conversation these Georgia boys started claiming that they had a bigfoot body ...

Click here for the YouTube video where they first mentioned having a bigfoot body


As Whitton and Dyer touted their bogus "bigfoot body" story, they noticed that some people were quick to believe them, or at least hold out lots of hope. The hopeful reactions they received from a few people led them to change tactics all together. Their whole game changed from bogus claims of expeditions to bogus claims of having a "bigfoot body".

While recovering at home from his gunshot wound Whitton was visited by family members. One family member was his brother from Texas -- Martin Whitton. Matthew Whitton, the sheriff, coached his brother to pose as a scientist from Texas who came to Georgia to examine the "body".

Click here for the YouTube video where Whitton introduces the phony scientist

Within a day or so of releasing that video "Dr. Paul Van Burren" was outed as Whitton's own brother. Matt Whitton was forced to admit, on YouTube, that he lied about the "scientist" but he continued with his bogus claim about having a "bigfoot corpse".

Click here for the YouTube video where Whitton admits lying about the "scientist".

A week or so after Whitton was mentioned in the local news because of his gunshot injury, various small newspapers around Georgia caught wind of "BigfootTrackers.com," and Whitton's claims of having a bigfoot body. A few articles appeared in small papers in Georgia.

The local media attention about their "bigfoot body" claims attracted the attention of more bigfoot researchers, including Loren Coleman and Steve Kulls.

Steve Kulls alerted his buddy, the notorious con-man and charlatan Carmine Thomas Biscardi. Biscardi has a habit of chasing the media spotlight in the style of Reverend Al Sharpton when a bigfoot-related story starts grabbing headlines.

Biscardi heard the smug boasting bullshit of Dyer and Whitton on Kulls' online radio show, which probably sounded, to Biscardi's ears, a lot like ... Biscardi himself. It inspired him (as he mentioned in the press conference). He envisioned an opportunity for another big, big ... bigfoot publicity scam.

Big media publicity had eluded Biscardi in recent years. His repeated promises of an imminent discovery, in different parts of the country ... stopped getting him press attention. So he stooped to hiring accommodating PR writers to write glorifying stories about him. These writers wrote about his escapades as if they were present. In one story from Texas he claimed that 35 people attended his expedition ... not long after a newspaper story described a recent BFRO expedition with 35 people in attendance ... The accompanying video showed that the only people who were present on the expedition (those who were not just curious locals with kids and grannies, coming around to see what the Hummer hubbub was all about), were the same handful of unemployed bums who followed him around the country for several months.

Biscardi could use the PR articles to prove that he was the world's preeminent bigfoot hunter.

Before that period in his career as a charlatan, he had perpetrated a bigfoot body hoax in 2005 on George Noory's "Coast to Coast AM" ("C2C") radio talk show.

C2C is broadcast in the middle of the night across the US and Canada. It has an audience of roughly 15 million people. Many, many people who work the graveyard shift of lonely jobs will listen to George Noory's nightly AM radio talk show concerning all things paranormal.

During this extraordinary radio hoax in the summer of 2005 Biscardi claimed to have a bigfoot body. He held the massive C2C radio audience in breathless suspense for a few nights, offering updates on "his team's" progress with a bigfoot body, all while encouraging the audience to subscribe (for $14.95 per month) to his remote web cam, where they might possibly spot another bigfoot at a location in Northern California ...

In other words, it was a scam.

Talk show host George Noory eventually smelled the hoax and demanded that Biscardi show his evidence or come clean.

Then Biscardi confessed, on the radio. There was no bigfoot body. He claimed he was "hoodwinked" over the phone by the alleged captor ... but his excuses and finger pointing fell on deaf ears. Noory was fuming. He demanded that Biscardi refund all the money to all the people who signed up for the pay-per-view "surveillance" project.

This radio hoax, and Biscardi's subsequent confession, were heard by millions of people across North America. The affair had curious parallels with Orson Wells' "Invasion from Mars" radio play in 1938, which held radio audiences in suspense and created a minor panic in New Jersey.

Orson Wells' unintentional hoax made him even more of a celebrity.

Roll forward to August 2008.

Once Biscardi got involved in the recent Georgia body hoax, he bumped it up to a new level of media deception. Biscardi began scheming to get lots of TV cameras in his face before it would become glaringly obvious that it was just another bigfoot body hoax similar to the one Biscardi pulled before on the radio in 2005.

Biscardi had an excellent hook for this carnation of his bigfoot body scam -- Whitton is a sheriff deputy.

Everyone knows sheriff deputies are totally respectable and would never tell lies.

The world press bought into the story, for a few days, but that was all the time Biscardi needed for this scam, and to fulfill his narcissistic fantasy of being a hero for solving one of the world's great mystery. He could feel like a big shot for a little while, at least.

Biscardi and Whitton were birds of a feather: two shameless, dead-pan liars, who had figured out that they could hold people in great suspense if they claimed, with a very straight face, that they had a bigfoot body, in their possession, somewhere.

For more details on how this ball bounced after that point, please wade through the rest of this thread. Notice that there is more than one page to this thread. At the bottom right corner of this page look for the "Page 1, 2,3" and click 2, etc., to see the next pages of replies.
Click to expand...
http://s2.excoboard.com/exco/thread.php?forumid=124725&threadid=1900226

And more on the exposure of the frauds:

http://www.bfro.net/hoax.asp
 
GTS

GTS

....
#8
Feb 8, 2006
3,435
6,143
113
#8
when this story broke it made me realize how dumb most people are. I was gettin a new phone in antioch and people were like "did you hear they caught bigfoot? no really they reported it on the new it's real".

That is why I don't talk about important things to people. It's pointless
 
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