Bigfoot or a big letdown? Trio say they'll unveil evidence of beast

KANSAS CITY, Mo. — Admit it. You want to believe.

The same way you want to someday comb a unicorn's mane and chat with a leprechaun, you'd like to think that these guys claiming they will unveil a real Bigfoot today aren't full of Sasquatch dung.

Yet — or is it yeti? — the chances don't look good. We — the 13-year-olds in all of us who pine for better video of the Loch Ness Monster and for a look at the water-powered car the auto executives killed — have been pulled in before. And we haven't so much as a tuft of genuine Gigantopithecus blacki fur to show for it.

At least three men — coincidentally all in the Bigfoot business — promise to unveil evidence at a news conference today in Palo Alto, Calif., showing that the elusive mannish monolith has been found.

The two Georgia men who claim to have found the mysterious beast in north Georgia — Matthew Whitton, a cop on leave, and Ric Dyer, a former prison guard — offer Bigfoot expeditions at $1,000 a pop. They have teamed up with Tom Biscardi, who has been searching for and making movies about Bigfoot since 1971.

Whitton has been on medical leave since being shot in the wrist July 3 while pursuing a robbery suspect.

His boss, Clayton Police Chief Jeff Turner, said that while Whitton has permission to run his Bigfoot business on the side, his claims of capturing the creature could reflect on his official image.

"When he comes back from medical leave, we'll have to sit down and address those issues," Turner said.

Biscardi claims he has had at least six encounters of the hairy kind and that he has landed in the area of sightings by others on several occasions.

In March, for instance, he took a film team to Bishopville, S.C., after locals saw what they called a "lizard man" and that he suspected — "you've got the real deal here" — was Bigfoot.

Two years earlier, he sued the Great American Bigfoot Research Organization over possession of a plaster cast of what was presumed — by those fighting over it, anyway — to be Bigfoot's big footprint. In 2005, he set up a pay-per-view broadcast over the Internet of a Bigfoot expedition near Happy Camp, Calif., after suspected sightings in the area.

Now he's promising "DNA and photo evidence" that the missing link is missing no more. A picture is up on his Web site, essentially a freezer full of something brown and furry.

"This smacks of Hollywood, not science," said a weary Benjamin Radford, managing editor of Skeptical Inquirer magazine and a lead author of Lake Monster Mysteries.

Biscardi, however, has no doubt about the authenticity of this find: "I touched the thing."