DEL.ICIO.USCop’s Bigfoot sighting has roots in Georgia lore
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Thursday, August 14, 2008
Bigfoot? In Georgia? However did he get in?
Friday at a press conference in California, two Georgians will produce evidence of what they claim is a half-ape, half-man hailing from the Peach State.
But according to dedicated Bigfoot followers, a large, hairy, mysterious creature has been popping up in north and middle Georgia since before European settlers arrived.
Native Americans throughout the continent have had a variety of names for the creature, including Hairy Man and Sasquatch. Northern California became Sasquatch’s cultural home in the 1950s, when a bulldozer operator cutting a road through the Bluff Creek area made a plaster cast of a footprint that was roughly 16 inches long.
Newspapers ran photos of Jerry Crew with his plaster cast, and “Bigfoot” was born.
This week, a Clayton County police officer helped give Georgia its own shot at Bigfoot glory, by claiming to have acquired a Bigfoot carcass in the North Georgia mountains.
Matthew Whitton, and his partner, former corrections officer Ric Dyer, announced they will reveal their findings today in a Palo Alto, Calif., press conference co-hosted by Bigfoot entrepreneur Tom Biscardi.
Biscardi’s Web site, searchingforbigfoot.com, was immediately swamped by Internet traffic and crashed.
While there is keen interest in the Southeastern Sasquatch among a small group of Georgia hobbyists, few of them were convinced that Whitton and Dyer’s claims would bring credit to the region.
“In my opinion it’s a hoax,” said Steven Hyde, who has spent many evenings in the woods tracking the possible existence of an Abominable Georgian. Hyde, 43, said he’s seen Whitton’s photographs of the putative Bigfoot carcass in a freezer, and says, “it appears to be a manufactured costume available on the Internet.”
On Whitton and Dyer’s Web site they call themselves “the best bigfoot trackers in the world” and offer a spot on their next expedition in September at $1,000, along with T-shirts that say “Bigfoot Tracker Chick.”
They’ve also posted a series of over-the-top YouTube videos attacking their critics and promising a dramatic “reveal.” Whitton has been on medical leave since being shot in the wrist July 3 while pursuing a suspect in a Krystal robbery.
Clayton police chief Jeff Turner said that while Whitton has permission to run his Bigfoot tracking business on the side, his claims of capturing the mythical 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.
Taking gullible visitors on Bigfoot tracking expeditions could be a new form of “eco-tourism,” joked Rick Spears, longtime “cryptozoologist” and author and illustrator of “Tales of the Cryptids: Mysterious Creatures That May or May Not Exist.”
Spears is an exhibit designer who works for Fernbank Science Center and studies mythical creatures on his own. He remains open-minded about the possibility of a real Bigfoot, especially since interviewing noted primatologist Jane Goodall, who told him that the evidence of Bigfoot existence is more convincing than the evidence to the contrary.
One tantalizing clue is a track left by some Shaq-sized creature on the banks of the Elkins River, taken by Pike County sheriff James P. Akin in 1997. Spears and Hyde both have castings of the 17-inch footprint, and Hyde has something else, a blurry photo from a daylight encounter in the Pike County woods.
“It’s what we call a ‘Blobsquatch,’” joked Hyde, meaning that the photo could be anything, though at the time he pressed the shutter, he says, he was looking at a shadowy figure 75 yards away that was thoroughly non-human and non-ape. “I watched the thing for almost 10 minutes.”
Wayne Ford, a reporter with the Athens Banner-Herald, said “if these things do exist, they exist around here.”
Ford has interviewed a number of Georgians who have had encounters with large hairy creatures, detailing some of those findings in a 2001 Athens Magazine story about “Georgia’s Swamp Ape.”
“It was not a bear,” one visitor from Tallahassee told Ford, about an August 2000 sighting in Putnam County. “The thing was huge. It was really tall and its head looked like it went right down into its shoulders.”
The grapevine brought news of free-range hairy beasts in North Georgia to Jane T.R. Dewar, co-founder of Gorilla Haven, in Morganton, and sent her checking on the gorillas that she and her husband shelter in their Fannin County sanctuary.
The two operate a privately funded getaway for zoo gorillas past their prime, and currently are tending to two silverbacks, Joe and Oliver.
“They’re all present and accounted for,” she said, “including their big hairy feet.”
AJC staff writer Kathy Jefcoats contributed to this report.
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