Published: August 20, 2008 12:37 pm            

More 'feat' than 'foot'

When I was 13, my best friend David Reed and I went hunting for rock chucks on Pharmacy Hill, a giant lava-rock encrusted hill that shaded my former town of Jordan Valley, Oregon. Expeditions up Pharmacy were nothing new to David, but they were always a special treat for me, as I lived on a ranch several miles outside of the city limits and had no desire to ride my bike along treacherous Highway 95 into town. The trek had started off well; we’d spotted a couple of rock chucks early on. We weren’t exactly ace marksmen, though. Really, the only danger the rock chucks actually faced was the threat of falling off their stone ledges while laughing uncontrollably at our lousy shooting.

Around noon, we were circling around the base of Pharmacy, in search of more targets, when suddenly David pointed up near the top of the hill. “Do you see that?” he asked.

“Whoa,” I replied eloquently. Towards the top of the hill, close to one of the many caves, was the definite outline of... something.

Being the fearless explorers that we were, Dave and I seized the opportunity to run back to his house as fast as we could. When we finally worked up the nerve to peek timidly out the kitchen blinds back at Pharmacy, the mysterious outline was nowhere to be seen. Granted, the sun had set almost an hour prior, but still...

At some point in our lives, most of us have found ourselves faced with the unexplained. It could range from a feeling of being watched to a mysteriously menacing outline on a hill miles away, and everything in between. But what about when we’re faced with unexplained answers to the unexplained?

Take the alleged bigfoot corpse that’s supposedly been found by a couple local yokels in Georgia. These two came out of nowhere a little while ago and started a business called “Bigfoottracker.com.” For a mere $500, the gullible were allowed to follow the supposed bigfoot experts deep into the heart of sasquatch territory in hopes of catching a glimpse of one of the mythic creatures. To be precise, the “sasquatch territory” isn’t all that remote. It’d be akin to me taking guided tours down to the more secluded parts of Wintersmith Park’s jogging trail in hopes of spotting a chupacabra.

Suddenly these guys started making claims that they’d found the corpse of a newly-expired bigfoot, complete with at least three different stories as to how they came across it. Instead of doing something crazy like turning the body over to authorities or to a university for confirmation and vindication, the duo opted to do the right thing and contact Tom Biscardi. The last time “Biscardi” was seen in headlines, it was followed by something like “confesses to bigfoot hoax.”

At Biscardi’s behest, the trio held a press conference on the other side of the country last Friday. What we wanted was concrete evidence proving the creatures’ existence once and for all. What we got were fuzzy photos of dentures and something in a forest and a claim from Biscardi that he’s hired private scientists from Russia to conduct testing.

No body. No decent photos. An “inconclusive result” revealing opossum DNA. The only unexplained phenomena here is how these three have managed to keep us in suspense for this long.

        

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