Bigfoot Experts Skeptical of Body in Freezer

Hooray! It's Bigfoot Day!

At 12 noon Friday Pacific Daylight Time, 3 p.m. on the East Coast, renowned Sasquatch seeker Tom Biscardi plans to hold a press conference in Palo Alto, Calif., to divulge photos and DNA samples purportedly pertaining to a dead man-ape found in the Georgia woods.

But even Bigfoot true believers are growing skeptical of Biscardi's claims, especially after seeing the photo of the body, viewable here.

"This body has little to do with Bigfoot and everything to do with a Sasquatch costume that someone developed after watching too many gorilla movies," warns Loren Coleman, who runs the influential Cryptomundo blog devoted to strange and unknown animals. "The teeth that seem to have been placed in the mouth could be my late mother's false teeth."

Matthew Whitton, a Clayton County, Ga., police officer on medical leave after being shot on the job, and Rick Dyer, a former corrections officer, say they found the seven-foot-seven-inch creature in the forests of northern Georgia in July.

"I've had interactions with Tom Biscardi in the past, and based on that history, I would say that anything he is involved in is suspect," Idaho State anthropologist and Bigfoot investigator Jeffrey Meldrum told Scientific American.

As for the Bigfoot body in the freezer, says Meldrum, "it just looks like a costume with some fake guts thrown on top for effect."

An online Halloween-costume store, TheHorrorDome.com, based in Port Washington, N.Y., sells a full-sized Sasquatch suit that strongly resembles the thawed-out corpse, right down to the height.

"It definitely looks like our costume," owner Jerry Parrino, who's been keeping track of the Bigfoot body story, told FOXNews.com.

The Associated Press compiled three different accounts given by Whitton and Dyer about how they found the body.

In one, the animal was shot by a former felon, and the men followed it into the woods. In a second version, they found a "family of Bigfoot" in North Georgia mountains. In the third, the two were hiking and stumbled upon the corpse with open wounds.

Two things stand out about Biscardi's claims: First of all, he's not going to be presenting a body — and in fact claims to not even know where the body is — and secondly, the DNA evidence he's promising won't be accompanied by a "chain of custody" that details where it came from and how it got to the lab.

In other words, all he may have is photos — which don't appear to be too convincing.

U.S. Fish and Wildlife Reserve spokesman Tom Mackenzie told the AP his agency isn't taking the claim seriously and won't investigate.

"It's not on endangered species on any list that we've got," he said.

• Click here to read Coleman's reasons for skepticism on Cryptomundo.com.

• Click here to read Scientific American's interview with Meldrum.

• Click here to buy the full-sized Sasquatch Halloween costume.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.