Georgia men claim hairy, frozen corpse is Bigfoot
ATLANTA (AP) — 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 plan to present 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 — http://www.bigfoottracker.com — 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.
During a press conference in Palo Alto, California, hunters of the mythical creature ''Bigfoot'' claimed to have found a corpse of the creature. Matt Whitton and Rick Dyer say that they were hunting for the creature in the forests of Northeastern Georgia in the United States when they came across the corpse of one of the alleged animals.

After finding the body, Whitton and Dyer allegedly took it home, where it is currently being stored in a freezer. Despite the possibility of the historic find, they will not say where they found the body.

"We have no intentions of revealing the location. We want to protect this creature," stated Whitton during the press conference. He also mentioned that an autopsy is going to be conducted on the body.

The two men had earlier claimed that DNA evidence, photos and video would be presented during the conference, but only one photo was shown. Whitton states that all evidence will be provided once the autopsy, scheduled for next week, is completed.

The single photo shown at the conference portrays a blurred black figure in the distance. Whitton claims the creature was walking "parallel" to them as they hauled out the corpse. Another photo on Whitton's website ''www.searchingforbigfoot.com'' shows what is allegedly the corpse, decapitated and stuffed into a freezer.

Tom Biscardi, founder of the ''Great American Bigfoot Research Organization'', joined Whitton and Dyer at the press conference. Biscardi has previously been caught in a hoax. In 2005, his organization claimed to have caught a live male Bigfoot.

Science website ''LiveScience'', run by Imaginova, openly speculates that this is a hoax because of the involvement of Biscardi. It theorizes that this may be a marketing scheme to promote an upcoming film by Biscardi, entitled ''Bigfoot Lives''.

At least one other person states that the group's pronouncement is a hoax. Jerry Parrino, owner of ''TheHorrorDome.com'', a website that sells Halloween costumes, was quoted as saying to ''Fox News'' that the photo appeared to resemble a costume that is being sold on his site.

"It definitely looks like our costume. This body has little to do with Bigfoot and everything to do with a Sasquatch costume that someone developed," stated Parrino.

Despite the claim, the Fish and Wildlife Reserve refuses to investigate the alleged discovery because it does not appear on an endangered species list in either the state of Georgia or the U.S..