Re[2]: [escepticos] Bigfoot ha muerto

[Mauricio <maur085@...>]

Hola,

El jueves, 12 de diciembre de 2002 Miguel escribió:

> Oye, que el NP va a resultar ser un NPI, que su Web me dice esto... 

> "Sorry, this story is no longer available. "

> Miguel Angel

Por suerte lo tenía todavía en los Archivos temporales de Internet
porque acababa de leerlo, así que ahí va.

Saludos,
Mauricio

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Bigfoot a big hoax: Fabled ape a wife in a gorilla suit
  
Michael Higgins  
National Post, with files from The Daily Telegraph and the Associated
Press

Saturday, December 07, 2002
 

The family of the man who first brought Bigfoot to public attention
has revealed how he fooled the world for decades with wood carvings to
create "footprints" and by filming his wife in an ape suit.

Ray Wallace, 84, died last month from heart failure and his family
have now revealed that Bigfoot was nothing but a hoax.

"The reality is, Bigfoot just died," his son, Michael, said.

Some experts on the American Abominable Snowman had for years
questioned Mr. Wallace's amazingly close relationship to the creature.

In August, 1958, a bulldozer operator who worked for Mr. Wallace's
construction company in Humboldt County, Calif., found huge footprints
circling and then leading away from his rig.

The Humboldt Times newspaper in Eureka, Calif., coined the term
Bigfoot in a front-page story about the phenomenon and a myth was
born.

Over the years, Mr. Wallace took pictures and 16mm film of Bigfoot
engaged in numerous activities, among them a pregnant Bigfoot sitting
on a log, a Bigfoot throwing stones and a Bigfoot eating frogs.

Mark Chorvinsky, editor of Strange magazine, investigated the
"pregnant Bigfoot" and in a skeptical 1994 article posed the question,
"Is the 'creature' in the photograph a 'real Bigfoot' or a
'guy-in-a-suit?' "

It now appears it was most likely a "gal-in-a-suit."

Mr. Wallace's family revealed many of the photographs were in fact
relatives -- usually his wife, Elna -- dressed in a hairy ape suit
with giant feet stuck to the bottom.

Mr. Wallace created the original tracks in 1958 when he asked a
friend to carve 40-centimetre-long feet.

He and his brother, Wilbur, then wore them to create the Bigfoot
prints.

The most famous evidence for Bigfoot's existence, the so-called
Patterson film, a grainy, cinefilm image of an erect ape-like
creature, was taken by Roger Patterson, a rodeo rider, in 1967.

Mr. Wallace said he told Mr. Patterson where to spot a Bigfoot near
Bluff Creek, Calif., Mr. Chorvinsky said.

"The fact is, there was no Bigfoot in popular consciousness before
1958," Mr. Chorvinsky said.

"America got its own monster, its own Abominable Snowman, thanks to
Ray Wallace."

"He did it for the joke and then he was afraid to tell anyone because
they'd be so mad at him," said Mr. Wallace's nephew, Dale Lee Wallace.

But Jeff Meldrum, an associate professor of anatomy and anthropology
at Idaho State University, said he has casts of 40 to 50 footprints he
believes were made by authentic unknown primates.

"To suggest all these are explained by simple carved feet strapped to
boots just doesn't wash," Mr. Meldrum said, citing 19th-century
accounts of such a creature.

© Copyright  2002 National Post