Animal Planet throws their hat into the Bigfoot hunting ring with a new six-part series beginning Sunday, June 5th, at 10/9 Central called "Finding Bigfoot". Of course, they won't FIND Bigfoot because we would have heard something by now. I watched the sneak preview Monday night on Animal Planet. There were a few interesting pieces of evidence though the law enforcement dashcam episode has already been called a hoax. As well, some of the personal claims made by Matt Moneymaker were questionable. Overall, this isn't a good start for the newest TV presentation about finding Bigfoot. The following is an article published back in January 2011:
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Bigfoot ‘sighting’ lures TV network
Although it's not writ in stone, Animal Planet is making plans to visit Lumpkin and Union counties. They are stalking the legend of Bigfoot.
The Discovery Channel, which produces Animal Planet, called local resident Mary Scott, requesting an interview with her. Scott, as well as a Lumpkin County Sheriff's Office deputy with whom she was riding during a Citizens Law Enforcement Academy ride-along, reportedly saw a Bigfoot about a year-and-a-half ago and captured it on the dashboard cam.
Scott said they were out in the Frogtown area when the sighting occurred.
“We were going about 55 mph on a curvy road. It was really late-after midnight, I think. We hadn't passed any other cars, and this thing came out of nowhere,” Scott says. “The officer hit the brakes and we both jumped out. We looked on both sides of the road but didn't see anything, and we looked at each other kind-of like, ‘You saw that, didn't you? I saw that.'”
Realizing the event had been recorded by the patrol car's dash cam, Scott and the officer returned to the Sheriff's Office where they viewed the happening on a larger screen.
“We were both just shocked,” Scott says. “It was really tall, and it really looked like the pictures you've seen of Bigfoot.”
The film found it's way onto the Internet, and that's how the Discovery Channel tracked Scott down, she says.
“I told them it all happened in seconds. It just came and went,” she says.
The TV representative told Scott they are planning to visit the area in February and plan to camp out in the area where she and the deputy made the sighting.
They may change their minds, however, when they learn that Sheriff Stacy Jarrard claims to have proven the sighting to be a hoax. Jarrard said he went out the next day to question homeowners in the area. At the first house he stopped at, he says, there were two young men, students at North Georgia College & State University, who were “acting really nervous. You could see their hearts were beating really fast,” he says.
The two did not admit to the prank right away, but later in the week they copped to one of them donning a gorilla suit and running across the road in front of vehicles on the night in question. Jarrard says he even has a photograph of the two boys with the gorilla suit.
If Animal Planet does decide to not to visit Lumpkin, they will probably still most likely visit the North Georgia area.
“They sent us a letter requesting to film at Track Rock in Union County,” said John Campbell with the National Forest Ranger Station in Blairesville. “The area is an archeological site, and is purported to have the footprint on Bigfoot.” - thedahloneganugget
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NOTE: you can find more information at Finding Bigfoot: The Evidence for Bigfoot: Animal Planet and Finding Bigfoot
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As expected, Matt Moneymaker responds to criticism of 'Finding Bigfoot' (unedited):
The comments by Jarrard were not true, as we discovered while we were there. He wouldn’t take questions from us when we tried to nail down his story.
No one from the sheriff’s department went out to speak with any of the neighbors after the incident. We spoke with the neighbors though when we were shooting the episode. There was never any college students living in the area, and there was no photo of college kids with a gorilla costume. Jarrard story sounded unlikely from the beginning, and apparently it didn’t happen.
None of the other sheriffs had heard about this story that Jarrard told to a reporter. It seems he came up with the story to quel any fear that local people might have about a monster in the woods, and to prevent hunters from going to look for one.
There was no other show that aired the dashcam footage. Finding Bigfoot was the first program to air the footage. Lotsa false nonsense coming up on this site today, but anonymous people claiming things they kinda sorta recall but can’t quite put their finger on it.
Moneymaker also replies to the “wood knock” and “call blasting” claims of who did it first:
That’s pretty weak...a book published in 1993 about a famous indian story teller. It doesn’t count. I had already been talking about that behavior for a year or more on the Internet (and debating with all the people who were saying I was crazy to suggest that) while that book was being assembled. I had been saying that bigfoots use knocks to locate eachother prior to 92, but all you have is the claim by a famous “story teller” in a 1993 book...that he knew they did that long ago. It doesn’t count.
Bill Dranginis is notorious for not telling the truth, and he was kicked out of the BFRO almost 15 years ago for exactly that reason. If he says he recalls an article describing someone else doing call-blasting before I did it...then he needs to produce that article. I kinda doubt it exists. Dranginis would not hesitate to make up something like that. Also, there were no recordings of sasquatches available in the 1980’s that could be used for that purpose. I got the first fairly clean recording that could that be used for sound blasting, and I got it in 1993.
Let’s see Titmus’ writings saying he did wood knocks back and forth with a sasquatch in BC...not just someone’s “recollection” of him talking about that.
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