A Timeline of Ridiculous Bigfoot Hoaxes

Ajouté : 2026-05-07

[00:00:00]Now, I don't want to offend anyone who believes in Bigfoot here, but hopefully even those of you who do can admit that there have been some incredibly questionable sightings over the years.

[00:00:11]And maybe we would all take the Bigfoot community a bit more seriously if these sightings weren't always getting exposed as hoaxes. But if it turns out Bigfoot is real, then I will certainly get sacrificed in the impending Sasquatch Wars. So, in the meantime, we might as well look at a timeline of ridiculous Bigfoot hoaxes. So, the whole Bigfoot craze starts with a guy named Ray Wallace. He was born in 1918 in Missouri, fought in World War II, and spent most of his life in the Pacific Northwest and Northern California, where he worked as a logger. But his big moment of fame came in 1958 when he announced to the public that he had discovered footprints of a gigantic creature outside his logging camp in Humbled County, California. This was then picked up by the Humble Times newspaper, which is where you'll find the first appearance of the term Bigfoot. That was then picked up by the national media and the world was forever changed by the existence of this ancient creature which had somehow gone unnoticed by humanity until 1958 when it decided to walk somewhere. So this one small town newspaper article unleashed a national craze. And even though Ray Wallace was the founder of the Bigfoot movement, it was quickly hijacked by even more invested individuals. Nine years after his discovery, the Bigfoot craze skyrocketed even further with the release of the Patterson Gimlin film. This is the short film that gave us the iconic Bigfoot image we all know and love. And it was filmed a few miles away from Ray Wallace's logging camp. The two men who filmed it, Roger Patterson and Bob Gimlin, had been rodeo riders and amateur boxers who captured the footage while they were on a Bigfoot hunt. As impressive as those credentials are, the film itself still has some doubters. And while this is probably the hardest Bigfoot sighting to debunk, it's also not exactly rocksolid evidence. It doesn't help that the film was supposedly shot on a Friday and was first screened the following Monday. But none of the labs that could develop Kodakchrome film on the West Coast did development on the weekends. But, you know, maybe they forgot the day they discovered the Sasquatch. In fact, the guy who developed the film says he forgot where he went to get it developed. So, no free promo for that place, I guess. Still, any doubts about the film were not enough to stop it from taking over the country. Roger Patterson even appeared on the Tonight Show to discuss his encounter with Bigfoot.

[00:02:45]These days, he could have parlayed that success into a podcast and a crypto scam. Overall, it's safe to say that the Wallace footprint sightings and the Patterson Gimlin film combined to give the entire country Bigfoot mania. But everything hit a wall in November of 2002 when Ray Wallace passed away at the age of 84. It was at this point that Ray's children came forward to say that the entire footprint thing was fake.

[00:03:13]According to them, Ray Wallace had asked a friend of his to carve some fake wooden feet that he could use to make the footprints to prank one of his co-workers. But the whole thing spiraled into a national story. Ray's son said this wasn't a wellplanned plot or anything. It's weird because it was just a joke and then it took on such a life of its own that even now we can't stop it. His kids say that Ray Wallace would lean into it and attend Bigfoot conventions while laughing in his head about how ridiculous the whole thing was. Unfortunately, this revelation did not stop the Bigfoot community. Most prominent believers said that they figured Ray Wallace was lying, but other people's evidence is real, which would mean that Patterson and Gimlin went to the area near Wallace's fake Bigfoot sighting and just happened to find an actual Sasquatch. Zoologologist and Bigfoot believer Dr. Wolf Henner Farenbach, yep, that's his name, was quoted saying, "All it means is that Ray Wallace is dead, not Bigfoot." The good doctor insists that he once got close enough to Bigfoot to smell him. He didn't see Bigfoot, mind you, but he smelled him. Which begs the question, "How did you know what Bigfoot smells like?" to which he answers, quote, "I didn't at the time, but I was later able to match the smell with other descriptions."

[00:04:35]Great. I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that Bigfoot smells a lot like the woods. So, since the Bigfoot community was undeterred by the Wallace family admission, Bigfoot hoaxes have managed to propagate into the 21st century, which brings us to a man named Tom Biscardi, who was a 19-year-old watching the Tonight Show in 1967 when Roger Patterson showed the country his Bigfoot footage. Biscardi remembers saying to himself, "How the hell can we send a man to the moon, but we can't find this creature?" Well, I have a theory, Tom, but you're not going to like it. So he made it his life's mission to find proof of Bigfoot beginning in 1981 when he produced a documentary called In the Shadow of Bigfoot, which was so bad that even the Bigfoot community didn't believe any of it. But Biscardi kept at it for decades.

[00:05:26]In 2005, he went on the late night radio show Coast to Coast A.M. insisting that he had footage of a captured Sasquatch that he would be airing online. as long as you paid for his $14 webcam service.

[00:05:40]Man's got to make a living after all.

[00:05:43]After several days of appearing on the show and begging people to give him $14, Tom Biscardi was pressured by the radio host before finally admitting that he was supposedly hoodwinkedked by a woman in Nevada and the Sasquatch was not real. to which the host insisted that he offer everyone a refund, which I guess means that the host really believed him, which is actually almost more sad than if he was in on the scam. And while Biscardi did offer that refund, it was not the last of his schemes. The following year, he claimed to be in possession of a baby Bigfoot hand that he had preserved in a jar. He said people were paying as much as $1,000 to see this hand, which probably ended when a hunter examined the hand and realized it was the paw of a bear or mountain lion with the fingertips removed so you couldn't see the claws. And honestly, if you're paying a grand to see a baby Bigfoot hand in a jar, it's time to put you in a conservatorship. But a hand is child's play compared to a full Bigfoot body, which is exactly what a man named Rick Dyer promised the public in August of 2008.

[00:06:51]Dyer, who was a former prison guard and active car salesman, teamed up with his friend Matt Witten, a police officer on medical leave. It's never the surgeons and nuclear scientists who discover Bigfoot, is it? The two men went on a radio show called Squatch Detective to announce that they were in possession of a 7 foot7, 500 lb dead Bigfoot body encased in a block of ice. They supposedly stumbled upon it while hiking in the mountains of northern Georgia, which would be quite the wide diaspora for the Sasquatch population. And if that doesn't sound very believable, don't worry. The two men got verification from a very trustworthy source, Tom Biscardi. Yes, our friend Tom joined Dyer and Witten to confirm that the body was real, saying to the media, "Last weekend, I touched it. I measured its feet. I felt its intestines." And I will admit, it's hard to argue with the old intestine squeeze.

[00:07:49]But once the block of ice was revealed to the public, and once it began to thaw, it quickly became clear that something was wrong. The owner of an online Halloween costume retailer saw the photos and said the body looked like one of their costumes. And soon enough, it was obvious that none of the body parts made any sense biologically.

[00:08:09]With that much public scrutiny, Dyer and Witten reluctantly revealed that the Bigfoot body was actually a Halloween costume stuffed with possum roadkill, animal intestines, and slaughterhouse leftovers. which actually makes me feel like we should investigate those guys for some kind of crime. I don't know what exactly, but they must have done something. Perhaps Dyer and Witten realized how psychopathic the whole thing felt. So, they tried to casually brush it off as a harmless prank. Dyer was quoted saying, "It's just a big hoax, a big joke. It's Bigfoot. Bigfoot doesn't exist." Which sounds like the words of a guy who just realized he could face serious consequences. Whitten added, "All this was a big joke. It got into something way bigger than it was supposed to be. It started off as some YouTube videos and a website. We're all about having fun. Unfortunately, his employer was not about having fun because Witten was fired by the police department shortly after the hoax. I mean, come on, Matt. You're giving cops a bad reputation. It didn't help that Dyer and Witten had also made money off their little joke. The host of Squatch Detective ultimately took the men to court because he had paid them an undisclosed sum for media access. You can scam the public all you want, but going after Squatch Detective is a step too far. And while the unemployed Witten returned to a life of obscurity, Rick Dyer resurfaced a few years later. In 2014, he claimed that he had shot and killed a Sasquatch over a year prior in San Antonio, Texas. Although that might have just been one of the locals.

[00:09:45]Apparently, he lured the creature out of hiding by buying pork ribs from Walmart, dowsing them in barbecue sauce, and nailing them to trees. Then he shot the creature in the middle of the night, spent over a year testing its DNA, and then announced a nationwide tour of the creature's body, which he had named Hank. Dyer would set up shop in various cities and give people the opportunity to see Hank's body below a layer of plexiglass, charging $10 for adults and $5 for children. And honestly, I would criticize people for paying to see the supposed body of Bigfoot from a guy who was only famous for scamming people about Bigfoot. But sometimes you just need something to do, you know? Get out of the house. Anyway, this was ultimately revealed to be a hoax. Big surprise. When a guy came forward and said that Dyer had hired him to create Hank out of latex, foam, and camel hair.

[00:10:39]Dyer once again admitted that the whole thing was fake, but he maintained that he does have a real Bigfoot body that he can't show us for some reason. And maybe that speaks to the ridiculousness of the entire Bigfoot community. At its heart, it's really just a bunch of people who want to believe in something and a bunch of people who want to scam those other people. And it's only fitting that the entire thing was born out of a practical joke. If Ray Wallace hadn't tried to prank his coworker, we wouldn't even have Bigfoot today. Wallace's son, Michael, later said it wasn't his fault that people latched on to it. But right from the beginning, he was Bigfoot. Ah, but that's where you're wrong, Michael, because at the end of the day, we're all Bigfoots. Also, I would say by definition, it absolutely was his fault.

[00:11:27]But I understand the poetic sentiment here. Now, please consider subscribing or I'll make you move to the Pacific Northwest.