Bigfoot Sightings Mix Hoax, Unknown

(CANVAS STAFF REPORTS) - It doesn't like sticking around for cameras. It is a legend that hangs on through generations and spreads throughout the land, taking root wherever there is enough forest to shelter it in the United States and Canada.

That creature is Bigfoot, also known as Sasquatch. It is an ape-like creature that is studied in the circles of cryptozoology, the search for legendary creatures who people claim exist but lack any physical evidence to prove.

It has its believers, but also has numerous skeptics.

Two men in Georgia claimed to have found a Bigfoot creature in 2008. Matt Whitton and Rick Dyer said they came across a 7-foot-7-inch, 500-pound corpse in the state's north side, according to the BBC . They had a photo of a large, hairy creature with an ape-like face.

According to FoxNews.com they stored it in a freezer and announced their find the following month.

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

The two men had started offering weekend search expeditions in Georgia, reported Fox, claiming they spotted other creatures in the woods.

Bigfoot researcher Jeffrey Meldrum, an Idaho State University professor, said the photos caused more doubt.

"It just looks like a costume with some fake guts thrown on top for effect," he told the Scientific American magazine.

The BBC said the two men also brought what they claimed were DNA samples to a biologist at the University of Minnesota. The biologist, Curt Nelson, said one showed human DNA, another was inconclusive and a third was a possum.

According to the UK Daily Mail , a man photographed a possible Bigfoot creature in Pennsylvania's Allegheny National Forest in 2007. He contacted the Bigfoot Research Organization, and group member Paul Majeta said it looked like a primate-like animal and could be a juvenile Sasquatch.

A spokesman for the Pennsylvania Game Commission suggested it's a bear with a severe case of mange.

The Daily Mail said recorded sightings of the creature stretch back to 1840.

The New York Times reported on one case that turned out to be a hoax .

Children of Ray Wallace said he created a modern myth of Bigfoot in 1958 by using carved wooden feet to stomp a track of oversized footprints at a Northern California logging camp.

Wallace died in 2003.

"This wasn't a well-planned plot or anything," said Michael Wallace, one of Ray Wallace's sons, to the Times. "It's weird because it was just a joke, and then it took on such a life of its own that even now, we can't stop it."

A few Bigfoot believers credited Wallace with the hoax, but said it doesn't mean the creature doesn't exist.

"All it means is that Ray Wallace is dead, not Bigfoot," said zoologist Wolf Henner Fahrenbach, who retired from the Oregon Regional Primate Research Center.

Fahrenbach had claimed that he's gotten close enough to smell Bigfoot, or at least how others have described his smell.

Dr. Matthew Johnson, a clinical psychologist from Oregon, told the Times that he looked into the eyes of Bigfoot while hiking with his family in the Oregon Caves National Monument.

He said that while Wallace may have hoaxed his tracks, "I can guarantee you that Ray Wallace was not walking around in a 9-foot Bigfoot suit in the Oregon Caves at the age of 82. What I saw was real."