Bigfoot in the news

Remember the story of the little shepherd boy who cried "wolf"?

The rotten kid made the announcement repeatedly just to stir up the villagers, even though the sheep were fine. Then one day a wolf actually came. When the boy cried out for help, the villagers thought he was full of it and ignored him.

Well, it appears most members of the media have never heard that story, because a cry of "Bigfoot!" certainly got the attention of villagers last week. The story echoed through headlines across the U.S. and even received international coverage. That's right, yet another ridiculous Bigfoot claim was being covered as closely as war, genocide, a hurricane and the Olympics.

The huge hairy creature has been a topic of folklore in North America since the 1830s. Since that time, stories of the cannibal standing somewhere around 8 feet tall and weighing around 500 pounds have been fueled by people finding possible footprints and feces, even thinking they captured its image on film.

I understand that people have a fascination with the unknown - the supernatural - and the possibility of a mysterious creature being positively identified for the first time ever is definitely exciting.

But no clear proof of Bigfoot's existence has ever been found in almost 200 years of talking about it in our country. Every now and then someone comes forward with what appears to be good evidence, but it never proves anything. Most of the time the claims are proven to be misidentified animals or hoaxes.

Yet for some reason, when a few hillbillies in Georgia came forward a couple weeks ago and said they had a Bigfoot corpse frozen in a block of ice, the story caught fire.

Some gullible hopefuls believed the men's claim, but most rational people agreed that they were crying wolf.

"Everyone who has talked down to us is going to eat their words," said one of the men. After all, they had proof, so they should be eager to prove doubters wrong, right?

So it seemed fishy that they only agreed to give the Bigfoot's body up to science after somebody paid them for it. Then, after all the build up, the truth was finally set free. As the ice started to thaw, a rubber foot fell out. Shocker.

Yes, the Russia-Georgia struggle, continued genocide in Darfur, hurricane Fay and the Olympics shared headlines with this nonsense.

Sure, there are some people who were disappointed that this was just another hoax, but is anyone really surprised?

I believe it's likely that there are other lifeforms out in our vast universe and beyond that we don't know about. But Georgia isn't that big, and if a Bigfoot existed down there, or anywhere, I'd imagine someone would've proven it by now.

But maybe I'm wrong. Maybe Bigfoot does exist. If we find out that it does some day, I'll congratulate those news agencies that followed this story so closely when it seemed like a waste of time.

I'll even fly down to the woods that Bigfoot calls home, shake its furry hand and say I was wrong. But if I was making a trip of it, I might as well fly my dragon up north first to buy some frozen fish from the abominable snowman, then drop by the lake to feed it to the Loch Ness Monster. He gobbles up anything that's fishy.

And apparently so do we.