This is so obviously a joke it's not worth the effort to mock, much less put forth any serious debunking efforts for. But it gave me a few laughs, so you might enjoy it too. A couple of hillbillies from Hog Waller, Georgia apparently ran out of hogs and/or sisters to screw, dun run through alla ther'un moonshine, and dun went and founded them a Bigfoot! For evidence they've got several contradictory discovery stories, a few blurry photos of a gorilla suit, and even an an irrelevant email from one-uv-them you-nee-vur-setty pointy heads. It must be true! Religions have been founded on less defensible evidence!
Anyway, with those bursts of phonetically-flawed mockery out of my system, here are a couple of amusing quotes
from the "news" coverage.
Whitton and Rick Dyer, a former corrections officer, announced the discovery in early July on YouTube videos and their Web site. Although they did not consider themselves devoted Bigfoot trackers before then, they have since started offering weekend search expeditions in Georgia for $499. The specimen they bagged, the men say, was one of several apelike creatures they spotted cavorting in the woods.
As they faced a skeptical audience of several hundred journalists and Bigfoot fans that included one curiosity seeker in a Chewbacca suit, the pair were joined Friday by Tom Biscardi, head of a group called Searching for Bigfoot.
...Biscardi fielded most of the questions. Among them: Why should anyone accept the men's tale when they weren't willing to display their frozen artifact or pinpoint where they allegedly found it? How come bushwhackers aren't constantly tripping over primate remains if there are as many as 7,000 Bigfoots roaming the United States, as Biscardi claimed?
"I understand where you are coming from, but how many real Bigfoot researchers are out there trekking 140,000 miles a year?" Biscardi said.
Um... what? Is that an argument for or against? Also, do the math on that? 140,000 / 365 = 383 miles a day. You wonder how he's got time to stop for publicity stunt press conferences with that sort of daily marathon schedule.
The whole thing is patently stupid, though. For one thing, it's funny how the media is all skeptical and suspicious and asking hard questions. Meanwhile, they greeted Dubya and company's stories about all of Saddam's nukes, and the precise locations of his WMDs, with nothing but the gravest silence and respect. If the media treated all utterances from politicians with the same skepticism that they do press releases from Bigfoot "researchers," this country would be an such better shape.
As for the Bigfoot stuff... please. Imagine you actually had found the freshly-killed carcass of an unknown higher primate. How would you go about presenting it? Even assuming you dared to touch it, and didn't just call 911 on the spot, and that you dragged it home and stuck it in a freezer... what would your next step be? Offering $500 backwoods tours to credulous fools? Holding press conferences armed only with painfully lame photos? Of course not. Those are the sorts of things that only people who have no real story or body or evidence would do.
The real story about this non-event would be what and why and how is in the human brain and pop culture consciousness that this sort of thing can get media coverage. What if they'd said they'd found a unicorn? Or the Loch Ness Monster? Or a noodly appendage from the FSM? Those would be just as believable of claims, and I think they would be almost unreported upon. Would even the local paper show up to cover that? Even on a slow weekend when we're all heartily sick of negative ads against Barack Obama, positive speeches by Barack Obama, and occasional mentions of that old guy he's running against.
Labels: conspiracy theories, the media
