Bigfoot A Hoax?

elzbal writes "The family of a Pacific Northwest prankster is coming clean. The Seattle Times is reporting that Bigfoot was just a creative figment of Ray L. Wallace's imagination. He orchestrated the prank that created Bigfoot in 1958. According to family members, he had asked a friend to carve a few pair of 16-inch-long feet. Then he and his brother Wilbur had slipped them on and created the footprints as a prank, family members said. He was also somehow involved in the famous walking Bigfoot film."

Comments

This is a SURPRISE?

[MacAndrew]

I was *so* relieved when the Lock Ness pranksters came clean. How cruel, exploiting the weak-minded, vulnerable and credulous ... journalists, conspiracy theorists, etc. Then there was that ship-eating squid thing a few years ago. :)

There are so many real scientific puzzles and the press preoccupies itself instead with the mystery of Michael Jackson's deflating nose (which has be checking my nose all the time now to see if the cartilage is poking through like his....).

Bigfoot, we never knew ye. What will the Weekly World News do? Their circulation has been battered enough already.

Re:It's not a question of likelihood

[cpeterso]

The stems are bent without damange to the plant and the area of the circles displays odd flux vortices.

These issues and more are addressed in CSICOP's "Circular Reasoning: The 'Mystery' of Crop Circles and Their 'Orbs' of Light":

Hoaxers, most croppies insisted, could not be responsible because the plants were only bent and not broken, and there were no footprints or other traces of human activity. Skeptics replied that from mid-May to early August the English wheat was green and pliable, and could only be broken with difficulty.

Re:It's not a question of likelihood

[snake_dad]

Hehe.. another entry for the future www.badbiology.com :)