Georgia men reveal Sasquatch "evidence"

PALO ALTO, Calif. — Whenever someone reports sighting the hairy beast of yore (details always fuzzy) or capturing the hirsute humanoid on film (images always grainy), it scares up a dubious debate of international proportions. Friday was the latest episode in the Sasquatch show.

Two men who claimed to have 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 have kept stuffed in a freezer for more than a month.

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

Whitton and Rick Dyer, a former corrections officer, announced the discovery in July on YouTube and their Web site. The specimen they bagged, the men said, was one of several apelike creatures they saw cavorting in the woods.

As they faced a skeptical audience of several hundred journalists and Bigfoot fans that included one in a Chewbacca suit, the pair were joined Friday by Tom Biscardi, head of a group called Searching for Bigfoot. Other Bigfoot hunters call Biscardi a huckster looking for media attention. Whitton and Dyer said a team of scientists is purportedly being sent to Georgia to pursue the matter. Biscardi, Whitton and Dyer presented what they called evidence supporting the Bigfoot theory: 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 was likely a possum and the third could not be tested because of technical problems.

At least one other researcher, Idaho State University anthropologist Jeffrey Meldrum, called the trio's claims "not compelling in the least."

He told the Scientific American that photograph posted on the Web site www.searchingforbigfoot.com "just looks like a costume with some fake guts thrown on top for effect."

Material from The Washington Post is included in this report.