Not Quite Yeti

In June, a car salesman and a police officer on disability leave from backwoods Georgia claimed to have the 7′7″ corpse of a Bigfoot stuffed in a freezer at an undisclosed location. Unsurprisingly, their discovery was received with skepticism. Then this weekend, DNA tests revealed that its blood composition was four percent human and 96 percent o’possum. So, that either means we have to rework our conception of Bigfoot and start visualizing more possum than ape, or it’s a big, dumb hoax.

But, hoax or not, the international media seems to have an untiring interest in the theme. Every couple years, news of another close call with a Bigfoot somewhere in the world pops up (Siberia in 2003, Mt. Everest in 2007), and concurrent with the American discovery this past June, a terrified BBC journalist affirmed the existence of India’s estimated 660-lb. mande barung (”forest man”). Hairs were collected after it was sighted in the woods, but all the lab results revealed was split ends.

Between Canada’s sasquatch, Brazil’s mapinguary, Australia’s yowie, Indonesia’s sajarang gigi, India’s mande barung, Malaysia’s mawas, Nepal’s yeti, and China’s unnamed, more petite version (according to reports, a gray-colored ape-like animal about 5′4″), it doesn’t seem like the world will tire of Bigfoot stories, preposterously falsified or otherwise, any time soon.