Bigfoot Duo’s New Discovery: A Lawsuit Against Them

The two goons who wasted the world’s time by claiming they’d found Bigfoot are now finding themselves on the receiving end of a lawsuit.

Matthew Whitton and Rick Dyer went the full nine yards with a news conference, DNA tests (that showed nothing), and all sorts of empty promises last week. Of course, it was all a hoax — and, as many had initially suspected, the creature was no more than a frozen Halloween costume filled with some random roadkill.

Now, the company that helped publicize the whole debacle is demanding cash from the country bumpkins. Searching for Bigfoot paid the doofuses $50,000 for the rights to their story, and it’s not happy the whole thing’s been exposed as fraud.

The good ol’ boys from Georgia, for their part, now claim it was all just a big joke and that Searching for Bigfoot is to blame for “blowing it out of proportion.” They say they never did it to make money — even though they’re still holding onto that $50K that somehow made it into their hands. Oh yeah, and they’re also selling Bigfoot stuff on their own web site.

That same man — who was a police officer in Clayton County, Georgia — has been fired from the force as a result of the scam.

Smart fellers, those Georgians.

I witnessed more media outlets going nuts over this story when it broke than I did individuals.  Anybody I spoke to about the news conference chuckled about it, expressed skepticism and anticipated a debunking by biologists.

It makes me think about Mulder’s poster, “I Want to Believe”.  A lot of people feel that way.  Whether it’s BigFoot, aliens, conspiracies, gods or ghosts, believers want to believe.  They don’t want to know.  They want to believe.  They prefer to believe.  To prefer to know requires the willingness to be wrong, to admit a misconception and correct it.  To prefer to know requires limiting or eliminating the concept of absolutes.  We have no reason to think that we know so much about anything that we’re in any position to suggest there are absolutes.  This reality is a relative reality.  We make best guesses based on our current knowledge.

My best guess is that the BigFoot, Nessy, ghost, gods, luck controversies won’t be resolved in my lifetime.  Superstitions die hard.  I don’t think you can kill them with silver bullets.  Knowledge and an inquisitive mind kills them quicker than anything.  Unfortunately we’re in the midst of another period of social religiosity.  Learnin is a sin these days.  Faith is all you need.  If eating oranges caused a person to quit believing in gods you know the religious would hear a command from their favorite god telling them that eating oranges is now a sin since orange doesn’t rhyme with anything in English, a sure sign of Satanic influence.  God damned orange eaters.  They’re all probably aliens.  Don’t be hanging around with them orange eaters.  They’ll try to probe you, then do things you won’t enjoy.