De Loys's Ape
In 1920 the Swiss geologist François de Loys, prospecting for oil on the Venezuela–Colombia border, shot what he described as a large tailless ape that came at his party by the Tarra river. The single photograph — the animal propped on a crate with a stick — was published in 1929 by George Montandon as Ameranthropoides loysi, the missing link of American man; Montandon used it in a racist theory of the separate origin of races. The picture shows an ordinary white-fronted spider monkey, common in those forests: the crate gives a true height of about a metre, and the tail is hidden behind the body. De Loys's companion later said the whole thing had been a joke at Montandon's expense.
North Georgia and the Bigfoot in the Freezer
In the summer of 2008 the police officer Matt Whitton and his friend Rick Dyer announced they had found the body of a Bigfoot in the woods of north Georgia — five hundred pounds, over seven feet — and were keeping it in a freezer. A press conference was called in Palo Alto on 15 August and the story ran worldwide. Three days later the investigator Steve Kulls thawed the contents: a rubber costume stuffed with offal bought from a butcher, with moulded rubber feet. Whitton was sacked by the Clayton County police, and Dyer ran the same trick a few years later with a dummy he called Hank.
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