The hoax file

Any field promising a spectacular discovery attracts people willing to supply one. This entry is restricted to cases where someone admitted the fabrication, where a maker identified the object, or where a specific material explanation was published by people positioned to know. Where the received version of a story turns out to be thinner than its reputation, that is noted rather than smoothed over.

The carvers

The oldest fabrication in the file is also the cheapest. In the 1930s near Toledo, Washington, a logger named Rant Mullens and a group of fellow foresters carved oversized feet from soft alder with a jackknife and stamped tracks near Mount St. Helens, mostly to unsettle huckleberry pickers. Mullens went public about it in 1982. DOCUMENTED Joe Nickell, writing in Skeptical Inquirer, gives the carved feet as nine by seventeen inches. What Mullens and his companions actually did fifty years earlier rests on his own late account and on no independent record.

The same group also claimed responsibility for hoaxing the Ape Canyon incident of the summer of 1924, in which prospectors said ape-men threw boulders at their cabin. ALLEGED That claim comes decades after the fact and is absent from the standard account of the incident itself. It also never had to carry any weight. Forest Service rangers J.H. Huffman and William Welch climbed into the canyon the miners had called inaccessible, found nothing, demonstrated that the fourteen-inch tracks near the cabin could easily be faked, and concluded the miners had placed the large stones themselves. DEBUNKED

A local Washington account holds that Ray Wallace asked Mullens for a pair of carved feet in the summer of 1958, to send to a job in northern California where equipment was being vandalized. ALLEGED That appears in the Lewis County Tribune and nowhere else this entry could open, and it is the hinge on which the next section turns, so its thin sourcing matters. (The same paper spells the name Mullins. Nickell and most of the literature spell it Mullens.)

The name

On the morning of August 27, 1958, Jerry Crew found humanlike prints around his bulldozer at a Bluff Creek work site in Humboldt County, California, where Wallace Construction held the contract. The prints measured almost sixteen inches long and seven inches wide and were pressed deep into a dirt road. Humboldt Times columnist Andrew Genzoli published the story on October 6, compressing the crew's "Big Foot" into one word, and the wire services carried it to The New York Times and the Los Angeles Times. DOCUMENTED

One caution on that date. Wikipedia's own article on Ray Wallace says the Humboldt Times first used the word in August 1958, not October. The two accounts cannot both be right, and this entry has not resolved which is.

Ray Wallace co-owned the construction company. His brother Wilbur "Shorty" Wallace was Crew's foreman. Ray had a local reputation as a prankster and later claimed he had captured a young Bigfoot, was feeding it Frosted Flakes, and wanted a million dollars for it.

Wallace died on November 26, 2002, at 84, in a Centralia, Washington nursing home. His son Michael then revealed that his father had kept large, crudely made wooden feet, and the family said Wilbur and a nephew, Mack McKinley, had worn them to press prints around northern California. The largest pair recovered ran between sixteen and eighteen inches and had leather buckles. That the family made this claim, and that the carved feet exist, is documented. DOCUMENTED

Whether those feet made the 1958 tracks is a different question, and it is disputed. CONTESTED Wallace never made the claim while he was alive to be questioned about it. The Bigfoot Field Researchers Organization published a rebuttal arguing the shapes do not match and that the physics do not work: "Stompers large enough to produce the tracks cast in 1958 act like snowshoes in soft soil. They cannot create the heavy compression seen in the 1958 casts." That page also reports Jeff Meldrum as having concluded Wallace could not have made the originals, though the argument is presented there in BFRO's words rather than Meldrum's. Ed Schillinger, described as the only living witness from the Bluff Creek job, has disputed the family's account.

The skeptical version of this story is routinely overstated. What a family said after a death is not a confession, and no one has matched a specific carved foot to a specific 1958 cast in public.

Bossburg, and the films

The Bossburg episode is usually collapsed into "Ivan Marx faked it," and the real sequence is more interesting than that.

On November 24, 1969, tracks with a deformed right foot were found near the town dump at Bossburg, Washington. René Dahinden arrived by November 27 and found them mostly trampled by sightseers. On December 13, 1969, Marx, a Bossburg resident, and Dahinden found what is described as 1,089 tracks in snow leading to, from, and across a river near Lake Roosevelt. Grover Krantz photographed and cast them. Roger Patterson was present. John Napier and, later, Jeff Meldrum examined the cripplefoot casts and found them persuasive, and Dahinden, who had his own suspicions about Marx's behavior beforehand, came down on the side of authenticity.

What followed in 1970 is the part that belongs in this file. Three separate schemes ran out of the same area, involving the prospector Joe Metlow and Marx: a captured Bigfoot, a Sasquatch foot in a freezer, and film footage Marx said showed the crippled animal walking. All three were treated as fabrications after Peter Byrne investigated. CONTESTED

Marx narrated, shot and executive-produced The Legend of Bigfoot (1976, directed by Harry Winer), and the same pointed head and ears reappeared in Tom Biscardi's 1981 documentary In the Shadow of Bigfoot, which the Bigfoot community regarded as laughably fake. Biscardi has said Marx mentored him in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The footage is rejected by essentially everyone who has written about it, including people who accept other evidence. Marx never admitted anything, and the Wikipedia sentence most often cited for the hoax verdict carries a citation-needed tag. Near-universal rejection is strong. It is not a demonstration.

Georgia, 2008

On July 9, 2008, Matthew Whitton and Rick Dyer posted a YouTube video claiming a body seven feet seven inches long and 500 pounds, found in the north Georgia mountains. ALLEGED Whitton was a Clayton County police officer on medical leave after being shot on the job. Dyer was a former Georgia corrections officer. Both were widely miscast afterward, including in the first draft of this entry, which had Dyer as a car salesman. He flipped cars in the Atlanta area later, after quitting the prison job in 2008.

The dated sequence is unusually well preserved.

The DNA result settled nothing and was never presented as settling anything by the person who produced it. The widely repeated detail that the sample came back "96 percent opossum" could not be sourced here at all, and is left out.

Thawing did the work instead. A hair sample melted into a ball uncharacteristic of hair, a section of the head was unusually hollow, and the feet were rubber. HOAX Jerry Parrino, who owns TheHorrorDome.com, said of it, "It definitely looks like our costume." That is a maker recognizing his own product, which is short of a receipt. Reporting at the time described the suit as packed out with opossum roadkill, entrails and slaughterhouse leftovers, though the contemporaneous investigation did not confirm what was inside.

Clayton County Police Chief Jeff Turner said, "Once he perpetrated a fraud, that goes into his credibility and integrity. He has violated the duty of a police officer." Contemporaneous reports refer to felony fraud warrants being sought. No outcome, and no conviction arising from the hoax, turns up in any source this entry could open.

Biscardi told reporters he had personally examined the specimen. Contemporaneous accounts note he was vague about what that examination consisted of, and the sentence quoted in a hundred retellings, about touching it and feeling its intestines, could not be verified here and is cut.

Hank

Dyer came back. He said he shot a Bigfoot near San Antonio, Texas in early September 2012 after baiting it with pork ribs from Walmart, telling Esquire: "I chased him down in the middle of the night. I shot him once, he ran, I shot him again." He then toured the body, charging $10 for adults and $5 for children to file past a wooden box under Plexiglas, with roadside stops reported as high as $100 a head. Stops included Phoenix, Amarillo, Houston, San Antonio, Katy and Daytona. When the tour began is not consistent across sources: Wikipedia dates the first showing to February 2013 in Las Vegas, while the tour is more often described as a 2014 run. This entry does not pick between them.

On March 31, 2014, Dyer announced on Facebook that Hank was fake, after a team member, Andrew Clacy, confronted him in Daytona. HOAX Chris Russell of Twisted Toy Box, a Spokane, Washington shop, built the figure from latex, foam and camel hair for about $4,000 at Dyer's request. Dyer sold the prop for $5,000 to Mr. Nice Guys, a Denver marijuana dispensary, whose owner, Jimmy Smith II, said he planned to build a terrarium for it.

The tour is said to have grossed close to $500,000. That figure traces to Dyer, carries a citation-needed flag where it is most often repeated, and has never been audited. Treat it as a claim, not a number. Dyer has continued to maintain that he possesses a real Bigfoot body he cannot produce.

Not every wrong claim is a hoax

On September 16, 2007, Rick Jacobs pulled images from a trail camera in the Allegheny National Forest, about 115 miles north of Pittsburgh, showing a thin, long-limbed, nearly hairless animal. The story went national. Pennsylvania Game Commission spokesman Jerry Feaser said, "There is no question it is a bear with a severe case of mange." DEBUNKED Eric Altman of the Pennsylvania Bigfoot Society, who is not a skeptic about the animal, also leaned toward a mangy bear while noting the images were grainy. BFRO investigator Paul Majeta said the opposite in the same coverage: "In my opinion, it appears to be a juvenile Sasquatch."

Nobody has shown the photographs were staged, and nobody has accused the photographer of staging them. They sit here as a boundary marker. A misidentified animal is a different failure mode from a fabrication, and collapsing the two is its own error.

The props are cheap

Mullens needed alder and a jackknife. The Wallace family found hand-carved feet with leather buckles, the largest sixteen to eighteen inches. Fake feet are common enough that the field coined a word for them, stompers. A Halloween supplier recognized the 2008 Georgia costume as a catalog item. The most expensive object in this file whose price is known is Hank, at about $4,000.

A cheap object can run for years. Frank Hansen toured a hairy humanoid frozen in ice through carnivals and fairs in the 1960s and early 1970s, saying it came from Siberia and that he was merely keeping it for an unnamed California millionaire. Ivan T. Sanderson wrote it up for Argosy in April 1969 under the headline "Is this the missing link between man and the apes?" John Napier investigated for the Smithsonian and reported that the institution "is satisfied that the creature is simply a carnival exhibit made of latex rubber and hair," commissioned by Hansen from a West Coast company in 1967, adding that the "original" and the later "substitute" were one and the same object. HOAX It sold on eBay in February 2013 to Steve Busti of the Museum of the Weird in Austin, Texas, and is on display there.

The prop also outlives the hoax. Boston.com reported on September 2, 2026 that Damariscotta, Maine police had fielded calls about "a Sasquatch, Yeti, Bigfoot, or possibly just a very large and hairy individual" on Main Street, spoke with the person, found no crime, and closed the case: "Just a guy in a very convincing costume."

Licenses, refuges and bounties

Skamania County, Washington passed Ordinance 69-01 on April 1, 1969, making the slaying of the creature a felony punishable by a fine up to $10,000 and up to five years in county jail. DOCUMENTED The 1969 text already covered the full range of names, forbidding the killing of any "nocturnal primate mammal variously described as an ape-like creature or a sub-species of Homo sapiens . . . generally and commonly known as a 'Sasquatch', 'Yeti', 'Bigfoot', or 'Giant Hairy ape'." The stated reason was not whimsy. The county expected an influx of "scientific investigators as well as casual hunters, many armed with lethal weapons," and wanted residents and visitors protected from them. It was published twice in the Skamania County Pioneer as law requires, was amended in 1984 to declare the county a Sasquatch refuge, and has never been repealed. The frequently repeated claim that the 1984 amendment downgraded the penalty to a gross misdemeanor could not be verified for this entry and is left out rather than repeated.

Oklahoma House Bill 1648, by Rep. Justin Humphrey, directed the state Wildlife Conservation Commission to set a Bigfoot hunting season with dates, licenses and fees. It was reported publicly on January 23, 2021, had its first reading on February 1, went to Rules on second reading on February 2, and died there. An attached bounty started at $25,000 and was reported at $2.1 million by March 19, 2021, payable only for a live, unharmed capture. No accessible source names who put up the larger sum. Micah Holmes of the Oklahoma Department of Wildlife Conservation declined to play along: "We use science-driven research, and we don't recognize Bigfoot in the state of Oklahoma."

Nobody collected there, and nobody collected on Spike's 10 Million Dollar Bigfoot Bounty either, an eight-episode series that premiered January 10, 2014 with Dean Cain, Todd Disotell and Natalia Reagan, and required any evidence to survive scientific testing. The $10 million was never awarded. The last team standing, Stacey and Dave, took the $100,000 consolation on February 21, 2014.

Biscardi had already shown how fast a capture claim converts to money. On July 14, 2005 he told Coast to Coast AM he was 98 percent sure his group would take a Bigfoot near Happy Camp, California. On August 19 he said he knew where a captured specimen was and sold footage through a $14 webcam service. Host George Noory demanded refunds on air. Biscardi said he had been hoodwinked by a woman in Stagecoach, Nevada and that the specimen did not exist. HOAX

When it costs something

Randy Lee Tenley, 44, was struck and killed on Highway 93 near Kalispell, Montana. He was wearing a military-style ghillie suit. Montana Highway Patrol Trooper Jim Schneider said Tenley "was trying to make people think he was Sasquatch so people would call in a Sasquatch sighting," and that alcohol may have been a factor. He was struck by a car driven by a 15-year-old girl and then by a second driven by a 17-year-old girl. DOCUMENTED NBC dates that death to "Sunday, August 27, 2012," which cannot be right as written, because August 27, 2012 was a Monday. The night was a Sunday in late August 2012. Two teenagers carry it either way.

Whitton lost a police career over a costume in a freezer. Past those two, the ledger of penalties is thin. No conviction arising from any case in this file has been located, and several of the hoaxers monetized their own exposure.

The ledger

What the record implies

The pattern holds across a century because the incentives hold. A convincing fake costs a few thousand dollars at most, and the payoff is attention, which arrives well before verification does. The hoaxer collects in full even when exposure is total and fast. The Georgia hoax ran thirty-nine days from first video to confession, and inside that window produced a signed contract, a cash payment, a national press conference and a lap through morning television.

That arithmetic will not change on its own, so this file will keep growing, and every honest witness pays the tax. Anyone who reports something now walks into a room already occupied by a basement full of carved feet, a costume in a freezer and a plywood box in Amarillo.

The right response is to insist on evidence a hoaxer could not have produced for four thousand dollars, and then to notice how little of the standing record clears that bar. The second right response is to hold the debunkings to the same standard. Several claims in this file arrived here with more confidence attached than their sources support, in both directions, and were cut back to what can actually be shown.

Sources

• Wikipedia, "Bigfoot" (Mullens, the 1924 Ape Canyon claim, Wallace). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bigfoot
• Wikipedia, "Raymond L. Wallace" (death date, Michael Wallace, Wilbur Wallace and Mack McKinley, Ed Schillinger). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raymond_L._Wallace
• Wikipedia, "Ape Canyon" (rangers J.H. Huffman and William Welch; fourteen-inch tracks). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ape_Canyon
• Wikipedia, "Bossburg, Washington" (the 1969 cripplefoot tracks, Dahinden, Krantz, the 1970 schemes, Peter Byrne). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bossburg,_Washington
• Wikipedia, "The Legend of Bigfoot" (1976, dir. Harry Winer; the hoax sentence carries a citation-needed tag). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Legend_of_Bigfoot
• Wikipedia, "Tom Biscardi" (2005 Happy Camp; Marx as mentor; In the Shadow of Bigfoot, 1981). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Biscardi
• Wikipedia, "Rick Dyer (hoaxer)" (Esquire quote, March 31 2014 admission, Chris Russell, the flagged $500,000 figure). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rick_Dyer_(hoaxer)
• Wikipedia, "Minnesota Iceman" (Sanderson in Argosy, April 1969; Napier; February 2013 sale to Steve Busti). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minnesota_Iceman
• Wikipedia, "Skamania County, Washington" (Ordinance 69-01 text, penalty, purpose, 1984 amendment). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skamania_County,_Washington
• Wikipedia, "10 Million Dollar Bigfoot Bounty." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/10_Million_Dollar_Bigfoot_Bounty
• Joe Nickell, "Bigfoot as Big Myth: Seven Phases of Mythmaking," Skeptical Inquirer, September/October 2017. https://skepticalinquirer.org/2017/09/bigfoot-as-big-myth-seven-phases-of-mythmaking/
• Mental Floss, "The Hoax That Led to the Word 'Bigfoot'" (August 27 1958; print dimensions; Genzoli, October 6; Wilbur "Shorty" Wallace; the Frosted Flakes claim). https://www.mentalfloss.com/crime/bigfoot-word-origin-hoax
• Mental Floss, "The County in Washington Where It's Illegal to Kill Bigfoot" (April 1 1969; penalty; 1984 refuge). https://www.mentalfloss.com/culture/folklore-mythology/county-where-it-is-illegal-to-kill-bigfoot
• Lewis County Tribune, "The True Legend of Toledo's Bigfoot" (alder and jackknife; the 1958 request; sixteen-to-eighteen-inch feet). https://lewiscountytribune.com/the-true-legend-of-toledos-bigfoot.html
• BFRO, "Wallace Hoax Behind Bigfoot?" (the stompers-as-snowshoes argument; BFRO's account of Meldrum's position). https://www.bfro.net/news/wallace.asp
• CBS News, "Bigfoot Claim Exposed As Hoax," August 19, 2008 (Kulls on the thawing; Chief Jeff Turner; Dyer as former corrections officer). https://www.cbsnews.com/news/bigfoot-claim-exposed-as-hoax/
• NBC News, "Turns out, Bigfoot was just a rubber gorilla suit," August 19, 2008. https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna26298733
• Fox News, "Bigfoot experts skeptical of body in freezer," August 18, 2008 (Whitton on medical leave after being shot on the job). https://www.foxnews.com/story/bigfoot-experts-skeptical-of-body-in-freezer
• OregonBigfoot.com, dated timeline of the Georgia freezer hoax (contract, advance, press conference, Jerry Parrino's quote, felony fraud warrants). https://oregonbigfoot.com/georgia_bigfoot_dead_body_in_freezer_dyer_whitton_biscardi.php
• Tim Stelloh, "The Hunter, The Hoaxer, And The Battle Over Bigfoot," BuzzFeed News ($50,000 in cash; the Spokane toymaker at $4,000; tour cities and prices; Mr. Nice Guys and Jimmy Smith II). https://www.buzzfeed.com/timstelloh/the-hunter-the-hoaxer-and-the-battle-over-bigfoot
• Fox News, "Hunter's photos ignite new debate over Bigfoot's existence" (September 16 2007; Jerry Feaser; Paul Majeta). https://www.foxnews.com/story/hunters-photos-ignite-new-debate-over-bigfoots-existence
• LancasterOnline, "You've got a fiend in Pennsylvania," October 31, 2007 (Eric Altman; Allegheny National Forest rangers on a mangy bear). https://lancasteronline.com/news/youve-got-a-fiend-in-pennsylvania/article_b658ec5b-0ffa-5be8-b32b-511e85f64c56.html
• NBC News, "Man killed during alleged Bigfoot stunt" (Randy Lee Tenley; Trooper Jim Schneider; the two drivers). https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/man-killed-during-alleged-bigfoot-stunt-flna967947
• Oklahoma Legislature, bill record for HB 1648, 2021 session (authored and first reading February 1, 2021; Rules February 2). http://www.oklegislature.gov/BillInfo.aspx?Bill=HB1648&Session=2100
• ABC7 Chicago, "Oklahoma State Rep. Justin Humphrey proposes 'Bigfoot' hunting season," January 23, 2021 (Micah Holmes). https://abc7chicago.com/post/bigfoot-hunting-sasquatch-season-outdoors/9875983/
• FOX 5 DC, "$2 million bounty placed on Bigfoot in Oklahoma town," March 19, 2021. https://www.fox5dc.com/news/2-million-bounty-placed-on-bigfoot-in-oklahoma-town-must-be-captured-alive-and-unharmed
• Boston.com, "Bigfoot sighting was just a man in a costume, Maine police department assures residents," September 2, 2026. https://www.boston.com/news/local-news/2026/09/02/bigfoot-sighting-was-just-a-man-in-a-costume/