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Rick Dyer, who had previously been involved in a 2008 Bigfoot hoax, has announced that his latest bigfoot body was a hoax. Dyer and his Bigfoot crew had a falling out last week which lead to Dyer’s reveal that the body he had been showing off at his nationwide tour was a hoax. Andrew Clacy, a spokesman from Dyer’s Bigfoot crew, confronted Dyer about the authenticity of the body and was told by Dyer that it was a fake. The body was made by Twisted Toy Box in Washington and was constructed with latex, foam and camel hair. Chris Russell, of Twisted Toy Box, said he signed an nondisclosure agreement with Dyer to keep this a secret. Dyer revealed the body was a hoax, but maintains that he did shoot and kill a real Bigfoot, he said he didn’t take that on tour out of fear that it would be stolen.
Photo: Screen grab from the YouTube video claiming to show Bigfoot wading through the snow.
took place in June 1947 when Harold Dahl reported seeing six “doughnut-shaped” objects in the sky while on his boat. Dahl claimed that some debris fell from one of the objects killing his dog and injuring his son. Dahl took some of the debris to his employer Fred Crissman who then gave it to sci-fi magazine publisher Ray Palmer. Palmer had two US Army specialists follow up on the report and take a box of “evidence”. However, their B-25 airplane crashed in August of 1947during a flight from Tacoma to San Francisco with the “evidence” on board, which spawned various conspiracy theories. Dahl and Crissman later admitted to faking the whole story and that the debris that Dahl said had fallen from the flying objects were rocks from Maury Island Beach. The plane crash was confirmed to be the result of an engine fire. Photo: Front page of the Seattle Times, July 27, 1947.
Photo: This is a screen grab from the video claiming to be of a dead alien found in Kamensk, Russia. Turns out is was made from chicken parts and bread.
Photo: Marla Cooper with a photo of her uncle, L.D. Cooper. Associated Press photo
Photo: Screen grab from YouTube video showing the sign lifted out of Puget Sound.
Photo: Christian Gerhartsreiter from Germany speaks with his lawyer as he attends his murder trial at Los Angeles Superior Court on August 15, 2013 in Los Angeles. Gerhartsreiter, the alleged Rockefeller impostor, was sentenced to 27 years for killing his landllord, John Sohus in February 1985. (JOE KLAMAR/AFP/Getty Images)
Photo: The press gathers in the rain outside the home of Jennifer Wilbanks, the former missing bride-to-be, and her fiance John Mason April 30, 2005 in Duluth, Georgia. Wilbanks turned herself in to Albuquerque, New Mexico police, saying she was not kidnapped, but had cold feet regarding her wedding scheduled for April 30 to fiance John Mason. (Photo by Erik S. Lesser/Getty Images)
Photo: Ex-New York Times reporter Jayson Blair, greets producer Robert Evans at a party for Peter Bart who is launching his new book called 'Dangerous Company' December 8, 2003 in Los Angeles, California. (Photo by J. Emilio Flores/Getty Images)
by a woman who threw acid in her face. Her story had holes and the burns did not look like the result of thrown acid. Storro later confessed that she burned herself, and that she suffered from body dysmorphic disorder, obsessive compulsive disorder, and depression. She plead guilty to a misdemeanor and received a one year suspended jail sentence, 240 hours of community service, and was ordered to repay almost $4000 in police overtime.
Photo: With her face severely burned and wrapped in mummy bandages, Bethany Storro gained worldwide sympathy in 2010 when she described a startling assault. Storro, who is white, had said a black woman had randomly thrown acid on her face on a Vancouver, Wash. street. Then she admitted she had burned her face herself and made up the story. Screen grab is from The Columbian newspaper, which interviewed Storro. Story is here.
Photo: George Plimpton connects with the baseball for a hit (Photo by RJ Capak/WireImage)
A bill introduced in February into the state Legislature seeks to claim Sasquatch as "the official cryptid or crypto-animal of Washington."* Hahaha, good luck. I don't know if a state's claim to the legendary hairy beast is contestable in court, but if it is, then Washington would have a fight on its hands.
While recently sipping, very tiny sips, a beer in a brewery in Missoula, Montana, I brought up the subject of Washington laying claim to Bigfoot to a few folks. A bona fide research ecologist straightened and said he knew of a 2009 research paper that documented the distribution of Sasquatch.** The next day, he sent it to me and boy, does it clear up a few things.
The main point of the paper published in the Journal of Biogeography titled "Predicting the distribution of Sasquatch in western North America: anything goes with ecological niche modelling [sic]," was that researchers needed to be careful with their data when creating ecological niche models (ENMs). Yeah, I thought the same thing.
"To demonstrate the potential for generating dubious yet visually convincing distributions from publicly available data we use ENMs to predict the range not of misidentified cryptic species, but of a crypto-zoological species – the North American Sasquatch, or Bigfoot," the researchers state.
BUT THE MUCH MORE INTERESTING POINT is the distribution of BIGFOOT!
The researchers collected and refined data from The Bigfoot Field Researchers Organization — "The BFRO web site was built and launched in 1995. It was the first web site to provide a collection of bigfoot/sasquatch sighting reports." — to generate the distribution of the best sightings in the West.
Judging by the hundreds of sightings spread pretty evenly throughout the West, either there's a few very fast and very active members of this species running around or there are simply a heck of a lot of them.
Now, Washington state has a lot of sightings, but Oregon and especially California do too. So, you know, those states have a claim to the big cryptid, as well.
To my point, the researchers state:
"In general, the ENM shows that Bigfoot should be broadly distributed in western North America, with a range comprising western North American mountain ranges such as the Sierra Nevada Mountains, the Cascades, the Blue Mountains, the southern Selkirk Mountains, and the Coastal Range of the Pacific Northwest."
Oh and even though our current government doesn't believe in climate change, the researchers did explore where Sasquatch's territory might drift:
As expected for montane organisms, the model predicts Bigfoot to abandon lower altitudes and also to lose habitat in coastal regions. However, this loss of habitat should be compensated by a large potential gain in the northern part of the Sasquatch range and in several other montane areas (e.g. Arizona, Nevada, Utah), should such areas remain undisturbed by human activity in the near future.
"Thus, given our model and available data, we might expect Bigfoot sightings to increase in frequency in northern latitudes and at higher elevations over the coming years."
Which spells even more trouble for Washington's claims to making this beast of legend the state's official cryptid.
* The bill's sponsor, Washington state Sen. Ann Rivers, said a kid suggested the idea; she "couldn't resist what she views as a teaching moment." Her news release adds:
"Washington's Legislature has adopted more than 20 state symbols, from a state tree to a state folk song and, most recently, a state oyster and a state waterfall. But the state doesn't have a designated "cryptid," or cryptozoological creature – meaning an animal not proven to exist, such as Scotland's Loch Ness Monster. Nor does state law make a single mention of Sasquatch, also commonly referred to as Bigfoot and sometimes Forest Yeti..."
** Spoiler alert: He added right off that the distribution of sightings of Bigfoot pretty much matches up with the distribution of black bears, and we got a laugh out of that. But don't read this caveat before reading the rest of the above story! Here's what the researchers said about black bears and Bigfoot: "... the two 'species' do not demonstrate significant niche differentiation with respect to the selected bioclimatic variables. Although it is possible that Sasquatch and U. americanus share such remarkably similar bioclimatic requirements, we nonetheless suspect that many Bigfoot sightings are, in fact, of black bears."
Jake Ellison can be reached at jakeellisonjournalism@gmail.com. Follow Jake on Twitter at twitter.com/Jake_News. Also, swing by and *LIKE* his page on Facebook. If Google Plus is your thing, check out our science coverage here.