The 2008 Bigfoot Body Press Conference — Palo Alto, California (2008)

On August 15, 2008, a press conference at the Cabana Hotel in Palo Alto, California drew international media attention when Matthew Whitton and Rick Dyer, along with Bigfoot promoter Tom Biscardi, announced that they had recovered the body of a Bigfoot in the mountains of northern Georgia. The men displayed photographs of what appeared to be a large, hairy, humanoid corpse stored in a freezer and presented what they claimed were DNA results from tissue samples. The press conference was chaotic and widely covered, with major news outlets from around the world reporting on the claim. Within days, however, the hoax unraveled spectacularly. When the frozen block was thawed before witnesses, the 'body' proved to be a commercially available rubber gorilla costume that had been stuffed with animal entrails, slaughterhouse waste, and loose hair. DNA analysis of the submitted samples returned results for opossum and human — consistent with contaminated costume material rather than an unknown primate. The fallout was swift: Whitton was terminated from his job as a police officer in Clayton County, Georgia, and both men became objects of widespread mockery. The 2008 hoax is now considered a cautionary landmark in Bigfoot research, demonstrating both the media's appetite for sensational cryptid stories and the reputational damage that hoaxes inflict on serious researchers.