Men Admit Bigfoot Hoax

By Laurel Jorgensen,  Newser Staff
Posted Aug 19, 2008 9:11 PM CDT
Men Admit Bigfoot Hoax
Matt Whitton, right, and Rick Dyer claimed that they stumbled across Bigfoot's corpse in the woods of northern Georgia.   (AP Photo/Ben Margot)

Bigfoot hunters will just have to keep looking. Two Georgia men’s story about finding Sasquatch has—surprise!—turned out to be a hoax, Cox News Service reports. Their ruse fell apart when a block of ice containing the “body” melted—leaving behind a rubber monkey suit. The men reportedly then admitted the hoax to a California organization that paid for the rights to their story. They checked out of their hotel and are now lying low, just like Bigfoot himself.

One of them, a police officer on medical leave, has lost his job over the scam. The police chief in Clayton County, Ga., fired Matthew Whitton as soon as he learned of the deception. “This turn of events from hero to someone who defrauds a nation is just baffling,” the chief said. He’d like to get Whitton’s uniforms back, but “we haven’t been able to get in touch with him.” (More bigfoot stories.)

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