Bigfoot press conference fails to impress skeptics

The two men who claim they've bagged Bigfoot would not reveal the location of the hairy corpse, adding further fuel to skeptics who claim the report is a hoax.

Georgia residents Matt Whitton and Rick Dyer said at a news conference Friday in Palo Alto, Calif., that they no longer know the location of the body, having put it in the care of sasquatch seeker Tom Biscardi, who runs the Searching for Bigfoot, Inc. website.

The two men tried to make their case in front of a skeptical audience as they told a story of stumbling across the corpse in the woods of northern Georgia.

Whitton revealed they had not only found a body, but had also seen several other creatures running in the woods. When asked what the creatures sounded like, Whitten, an officer on medical leave from the Clayton County Police Department, said they did not make a noise.

"They were silent," he said.

Whitton and Dyer have so far offered three different tales about how they came to find the creature: In one, the animal was shot by a former felon, and the men followed it into the woods. In a second version, they found a "family of Bigfoot" in North Georgia mountains. In the third, the two were hiking and stumbled upon the corpse with open wounds.

Biscardi vowed that DNA evidence would vindicate the men. But he later said that one of the three samples sent for examination came back as human DNA, another was inconclusive, and a third came back as the DNA of a possum, which he said could have been from something the Bigfoot ate.

Even before the three men took the stage, skeptics who had seen the photographs of what looks like a furry creature in a freezer were not impressed.

"What I've seen so far is not compelling in the least, and I think the pictures cast grave doubts on their claim," Jeffrey Meldrum, a Bigfoot researcher and Idaho State University professor, told Scientific American magazine.

"It just looks like a costume with some fake guts thrown on top for effect."