Three Bigfoot Hoaxes that were a LOT Worse than Coyote Peterson's Skull Stunt

Coyote Peterson's Bigfoot skull publicity stunt made headlines, frustrating and aggravating fans and online educators alike.

Coyote's "discovery" was presented as a fictional "what-if" scenario, seemingly to encourage his audience to question why such evidence has never been found before. It wasn't so much a hoax as it was slightly misguided clickbait.

Other would-be Sasquatch body snatchers, however, have had much less educational goals in mind.

Here are three of the most notable Bigfoot corpse hoaxes to date...

The Minnesota Iceman

Bigfoot... on ice!

 

The Minnesota Iceman was the supposed cadaver of a Sasquatch-like critter recovered from Vietnam in the 1960s. While this "specimen" isn't technically part of the Sasquatch family, having emerged from stories that originated on the other side of the world, I think we can lump it in with the American Bigfoot mythos for the sake of this article.

Credit: Darren Naish, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. Source.

The Iceman toured the US as a sideshow attraction, earning the attention of skeptics and true believers alike. Two cryptozoologists, Bernard Heuvelmans and Ivan Sanderson, invested quite a bit of time and energy espousing this thing's authenticity. But other experts weren't so convinced.

The supposed frozen body seemed to change appearance on a regular basis. Primatologist John Napier said that the "specimen" was clearly a latex model.

What is very likely the original Iceman himself (latex and all) eventually landed in the Museum of the Weird, in Texas.

Darren Naish, paleontologist and author of Hunting Monsters (2016) wrote an excellent  article about the Minnesota Iceman, available to read on the Scientific American website.

The Dyer Bigfoot Hoax

Bigfoot and Con Artists go together like Halloween Costumes and Roadkill.

 

In 2008, Bigfoot enthusiast¸ Rick Dyer and Matthew Whitton claimed to have found a dead Bigfoot. They released some characteristically low-res footage of the "body" before freezing it, putting it on display, and selling it.

It certainly made headlines (and raked in a healthy helping of cash). But it didn't last.

Not long after the big reveal, it became clear that the "corpse" was actually a halloween costume stuffed with roadkill.

In my professional opinion... that's gross.

For his part in the hoax, Whitton was fired from the Clayton County police force.

Dyer, though, would move on to... well, basically do the same thing again.

The Other Dyer Bigfoot Hoax

Return of the Halloween Prop (sans roadkill).

About four years after his first Sasquatch corpse hoax, Dyer returned in 2012 with yet ANOTHER Bigfoot corpse. This time, he claimed to have taken the beast down himself. He assured the Bigfoot community that it was all totally legit this time, as he paraded the thing around in a freezer truck and showed it off in parking lots.

Totally legit...

Except it wasn't at all legit...

The prop, nicknamed "Hank," was produced by a maker of Halloween props. It was mostly latex and camel hair.

The rest is history.

I'm not saying Sasquatch doesn't exist. But at this point, I'd personally wager the odds of him existing are about as good as a truckstop sideshow exhibit being legit.

If he DOES exist, I sure hope he never sees the hogwash we've associated with him.

Safe travels! 🛸

--Sean