Each week, Weird Things’ own Matt Finley breaks down one of the oddest elements of our culture in a feature we call Monster Of The Week. This week we chronicle the Great Lake Monster Hoaxes. Monday we looked at the hoax that defined a town. Wednesday we learned how one man created his own lake monster sham.

Maybe it’s because we’re at a century’s distance with only selective research sources left to go by, but I feel like there’s respectable, genteel nobility behind both the Hodag hoax and the Lake George Monster prank. I say this in light of the 2008 Bigfoot corpse fiasco, which mirrored modern film and record promotion campaigns far more than it did the homegrown ingenuity of yesteryear’s cryptid shenanigans. At the same token, it’s difficult, in the case of the Sasquatch carcass thimblerig, to figure out exactly where the wild dream logic and delightful homespun madness ended and where the frustrating dishonesty and grubby-handed cash pawing began.

It’s easy to point fingers at Carmine Thomas Biscardi, the Las Vegas promoter and notorious Bigfoot hoaxer, who teamed up with the two Georgia pranksters after they had already set their small-scale practical joke in motion… easy because he’s obviously guilty, and by far the least sympathetic party involved. In 2005, Biscardi went on Coast to Coast AM to brag about a live Bigfoot specimen that everybody could watch and enjoy via live webcam feed… for a subscription fee of $14. The surprise here isn’t that there wasn’t actually a captive Sasquatch pacing circles in front of the camera lens, but rather that there was nothing pacing anything anywhere; Biscardi didn’t even try to fake a spectacle. After announcing that there was never a live specimen and claiming that he, too, had been ripped off by the people in possession of the non-existent Bigfoot, Biscardi took the webcam money and ran. (To his dubious credit, he did refund all post-prank-revelation subscription orders.) The refusal to present even the drunkest of vagrants in the nattiest of Gorilla Grodd costumes clearly crosses the line between hoax and scam.

So after Biscardi jumped on the bandwagon-cum-Yeti-hearse of the Georgian sheriff’s deputy and his used car salesman buddy, it was really tempting to cite him as the reason that the hoax felt less like a harmless, misguided jape than a carefully orchestrated deception. After all, Biscardi’s the one who called down the media frenzy, and who organized the ridiculous live press conference, and who, at the outset, before pictures of the so-called corpse were released on the Internet, charged folks $2 a pop for cadaver photos. On the other hand, Biscardi didn’t start the hoax. He didn’t author the boys’ tale of hiking through the woods and finding the 7’ 7” fur-covered body amid a gathering of three similar living creatures. He even joined up after the first YouTube video was filmed. Biscardi is just a savvy, opportunistic mooch, the crooked conductor of a runaway train built by Deputy Matthew Whiton and Rick Dyer.

Get the rest of the story AFTER THE JUMP…

Dyer and Whiton are harder to pin down. It takes very specific sort of f***-all enthusiasm to dash out into the world claiming to have found the bloating corpse of a monster. Still, a century before, Eugene Shepard ran into Rhinelander, Wisconsin with not only the faked corpse of a monster, but also an epic tale detailing how he and a lumberjack posse had killed the beast with dynamite. In both cases a false cadaver was created, and advertised as the genuine artifact. I haven’t found anything to indicate that Shepard charged anyone to take a look-see at the immolated Hodag, but neither is it clear what sort of monetary designs Dyer and Whiton did or didn’t have before Biscardi joined up (though the ease with which the Vegas promoter convinced them that their bizarre animal was, in actuality, a cash cow doesn’t speak well of their intentions). “But,” you point out, “Shepard did charge people a dime to see the supposed live Hodag at the County Fair.” And here, again, we are walking the high wire between hoax and scam.

Even disregarding the fact that’s Shepard’s Hodag wasn’t presented in a cultural vacuum – patrons were almost certainly familiar with sideshows and similar humbugs that offered creative, entertaining, but generally obvious, deceptions for a minimal fee – the lurching automaton voiced by Shepard’s son and accompanied by Shepard’s own manic, silver-tongued narration provided enough of a spectacle to justify the minimal price of admission. And it’s hard to tell whether or not Dyer and Whiton possess whatever unnamable compulsion drives people to rig up robot monsters or add a set of blue ears to a painted, pulley-rigged stick. They certainly aren’t like Biscardi, who uses big talk and empty promises to pocket fat stacks of money for nothing. At the same time, they seemed to lack the joyfulness and enthusiasm that both Shepard and Watrous felt for their respective creations. Despite their commitment to creating an ad hoc monster body, they seemed more obsessed with the publicity and cultural caché than with the actual source of attention – Bigfoot remains. Seriously low rent Bigfoot remains.
And for me, that was what ultimately made the 2008 Bigfoot corpse fiasco seem so disingenuous. Initially, the whole business had me really excited – not because I believed the body was real, but because I wanted to see how far they would take it. How much effort they would put into the spectacle. Whether or not, like Shepard and Watrous, they would show us something that, while false according to its supposed identity, was real in its creativity and craftsmanship. I was hoping for a fully autopsy-ready body, with layers of correctly placed viscera, a stomach rife with clues pointing to the identity of its last meal, and maybe even a couple ridiculous, but no less entertaining, physiological revelations (Bigfoot has two hearts! Bigfoot has an artificial hip, indicating that Sasquatches have surprisingly advanced medical capabilities!) So when word came out that it was just an ape suit stuffed with hotdog ingredients, I was more than a little chagrined.

I don’t know where this leaves us. It’s seems reductive to blame Dyer and Whiton’s misguided bottom-shelf prankery on new media and a reality show culture that promise fame to the commoner and increasingly value the frenzied swapping of digital information over a tangible engagement with a physical product, though I’m sure once Biscardi was involved he convinced the boys that, these days, a ridiculously low investment often yields high temporary returns. After all, the hoax was never meant to go undetected forever… just long enough for the three yeti coroners to fill their coffers through the exploitation of Bigfoot enthusiasts and cryptid research groups. Then again, in this day and age, even a well-intentioned prankster with boundless integrity would be remiss to entirely forego a Web presence in favor of some falsely idealized “old fashioned” route.

No, I think the problem with all of this – the thing that made Dyer and Whiton’s Bigfoot prank feel dire and witless – was the pranksters seeming lack of fun. Imagine a grinning Eugene Shepard storming out of the woods with his carbonized Hodag, or a giggling Harry Watrous hiding in some shrubs, waiting to loose his hippogriff upon a hapless boater. These locally performed stunts were just that – performed, with the jerry-rigged monsters taking center stage as their creators MC’d or crouched behind an azalea bush. A snarling Hodag. A blue-eared hippogriff. A hypothetical surgically enhanced dual-hearted Bigfoot. These pranks are attractive because they seek to knit our dreams and nightmares from the mundane yarn of the everyday – to bring us as close as we’ll ever come to actual monsters. What the Dyer and Whiton did was mug for the camera, all the while taunting us with a shi**y cat’s cradle strung between 10 middle fingers.

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