While watching Ghost Hunters last week I saw a promo for an upcoming series on SyFy called Fact or Faked: Paranormal Files and it sure sounds like my kinda show! From the SyFy website…

Fact or Faked: Paranormal Files is set to revolutionize paranormal programming by investigating the evidence witnesses post on the Internet every day. Have you ever seen a photo or video online and wondered, “Is this real?” This is the show that will answer that question.

Heading up the Fact or Faked: Paranormal Files team is Ben Hansen, a former FBI agent with a life-long fascination with the paranormal. Now, having left the agency, he leads a young team of intrepid investigators who will convene to dissect the latest unusual images and decide whether they merit further investigation. Grainy videos will be brought to life as the team conducts thorough and elaborate experiments in an attempt to recreate the phenomena, and Ben will make the final choice which cases will require a trip into the field.

The series premiere is Thursday, July 15th at 10 Eastern (9 Central). Can’t wait!

So today is supposedly the big day when a couple of dudes (Matthew Whitton and Rick Dyer) from Georgia (the southern USA state – not the country currently being invaded by Russia) hold a press conference and reveal to the world that they have found Bigfoot. Their proof? The screenshot above, taken from a video they created.

So many red flag questions arise from this whole incident like: Why hold a press conference? Why not just turn the carcass over to reputable scientists for inspection? Why not send samples from the carcass to numerous labs across the country for analysis? Why not release numerous, high resolution images of the carcass along with detailed photos of the location where it was found? Why does it look exactly like a soggy version of this Bigfoot costume with some entrails thrown on it? And, most importantly, why would you keep such a monumentally historic find ON ICE IN YOUR BEER COOLER!?!

You know something is a hoax when even the Bigfoot Field Researchers Organization comes out against your claims of finding proof that Bigfoot exists. The press conference is being put on by Carmine Thomas Biscardi – a Las Vegas promoter who has orchestrated Bigfoot hoaxes in the past. I am sure at this press conference they will have “scientists” (aka “dudes in lab coats they have paid to be there” – the “scientist” that appears in this YouTube video about the Georgia Bigfoot find is actually Whitton’s brother, who is not a scientist) to back up their “DNA evidence”.

All I can say is, to me that photo looks like a perfectly good waste of a beer cooler.

UPDATE: As expected, the press conference was a whole lot of talking with little showing of anything that would pass as evidence. IMO, the photo of the “teeth” they showed seem awfully white and straight for a wild creature that has been living in the woods.

Related Articles…

Bigfoot Hunters Press Conference Reveals… Little [Fox News]

Bigfoot Press Conference Yields Little Evidence, Lots of Scorn [Scientific American]

‘Bigfoot’ press conference reveals possum DNA [The Atlanta Journal-Constitution]

The Bigfoot press conference and the art of selling a website [C|NET News]

UPDATE 8/19: Annnnnnnd, it’s official…

Bigfoot Finding A Fraud [WGCL 46 News, Atlanta]

UPDATE 8/21: In the “Seriously, You Have Nothing Better To Do With Your Time?” Dept. …

Bigfoot hoaxers say it was just ‘a big joke’ [CNN]

Gratuitous use of Colbert: I could have put a pic of just the ugly Montauk Monster here, but instead I am balancing the ugly out with the beauty of Stephen Colbert.

Sarah Kliff of Newsweek just wrote a great (web exclusive) article titled: Is Seeing Believing? – In the age of Photoshop, the ‘Montauk Monster’ picture raises questions about the veracity of photography.

The public’s skepticism over whether or not they can believe what they see in photographs isn’t unwarranted. Just last week, Beijing organizers admitted to using “previously recorded footage” and computerized images during the Olympic opening ceremony to enhance the quality of fireworks for broadcast on television. A month before that, a doctored photograph of Iranian missiles turned up on front pages across the globe. The alteration—an extra missile added to the image—was outed within hours of the photograph’s publication. “With technology, you can make the moment anything you want it to be,” says John Long, the ethics committee chair for the National Press Photographers Association. “Our credibility has been stretched in so many ways, so I don’t think the public has a great deal of faith in us.” He admits the past year hasn’t been the best for photojournalism’s credibility but doesn’t think the future is particularly gloomy—it just puts the burden on the photojournalist to tell the truth, rather than on the photograph itself. “Just like we trust the reporter to represent what they see accurately, we’re going to have to develop that same relationship with photographers,” he says. NEWSWEEK’s Sarah Kliff spoke with Long about why the credibility of photojournalism has fallen, whether or not doctored photographs are more likely to get caught these days, and how photographers can reclaim the public’s trust.

[read the rest of the article...]

This 1934 image of “Nessie” is probably the most widely published fake photo ever taken.

I am kicking off this blog with the story of one of the most widely published fake photos ever taken. Although there had been many documented sightings of a creature in Loch Ness over the centuries, the photo above was the first “proof” of the monster’s existence and made headline news all over the world.

The photographer was supposedly Robert Wilson, a respected surgeon. However, Wilson never actually published the picture himself (just submitted it to the Daily Mail) and other than telling his original story of seeing something in the water and taking a photo of it, he refused to further comment on the photo or to have his name credited to it. (This is why the photo was dubbed simply as “the surgeon’s photo”.)

That is what I would dub simply as “a red flag”.

Despite many years of debate over the photo’s authenticity, it wasn’t until a deathbed confession in 1994 that the hoax was revealed – “Nessie” had been nothing more than a toy submarine with a sculpted monster head attached. The confession was made by the model-maker himself, Christian Spurling, who made the model at the behest of his father-in-law, Marmaduke Wetherell. The reason behind the hoax was that Wetherell wanted to seek revenge on the Daily Mail for publicly ridiculing him.

The photo is still shown today on television shows and in articles of which the Loch Ness monster is the topic, and it is shocking to see that it sometimes is still passed off as “evidence”.