Dumb & Dumber – The case of the Georgia Bigfoot Body

If I were to write a comedy about two guys finding the body of the missing link, I couldn’t write anything that comes as close to being as absurd and funny as what has been unfolding in the mountains of North Georgia over the past several weeks. I knew that fact is stranger than fiction, but I had no idea it was more hilarious. For those of you who haven’t been paying attention, (and unless you’re a Bigfoot fanatic why would you) two good old boys in Georgia with ties to law enforcement have claimed they have the dead body of Bigfoot. Their names: Matthew Gary Whitton and Ricky Traylor Chuck Dyer (Does anyone really need four names?). Their contribution to science: unabashed inanity. Imagine Jim Carrey and Jeff Daniels in Dumb & Dumber and you will have some idea of the character and mental acuity we are dealing with here.

The plot: Matthew and Ricky, bored with dealing with the criminal element in North Georgia, decide to start a business. They attend a small business fair in Atlanta with an eye on opening up a Starbucks franchise in Lumpkin, Georgia. They give all their cash to a random employee at the convention center claiming to be the president of Starbucks. Hilarity ensues when they discover their mistake. A series of pratfalls and slapsticky goodness follows until the guys literally run into their destiny – a booth for a business that will cost them nothing more than a pair of Nikes and a stick of gum – Bigfoottrackers.com . They attend a three hour class to become certified Bigfoot trackers. The class entails them learning how to spell Bigfoot forwards and…. Here’s the tough part – backwards! Yikes. The reasoning for spelling backwards? Everyone knows you don’t truly know a wild animal until you’ve seen him from the rear. Huh? Makes sense to them. Completing their three hour course in a mere two days, they jump into the Bigfoot tracking business whole-heartedly. They put up a website on their microwave, and wait for the money to roll in. After two months of checking the microwave for emails and not receiving one single inquiry, they realize while the interweb is great for cooking burritos in record time, it’s a lousy place to try and run a business. They decide to try and upload videos for Youtube through their coffeemaker. As the weeks roll by with no luck, their eight-year-old neighbor takes pity on them and helps them setup their website on a computer, and he also edits and uploads their Youtube videos. Finally, they’re in business.

As luck would have it, they land their first customer, a blind, brain damaged primatologist who is dead set on finding the elusive undiscovered bipedal primate he has given the scientific nomenclature Biggist Apist. They set out on their weeklong expedition with pellet guns and a day’s supply of power bars. An hour into their hike they stumble across the dead body of Bigfoot… kind of. Turns out it’s just a freakishly overweight squirrel, but due to the fact they cheated on their final exam in Bigfoot tracker school, they misidentify the carcass with the help of their blind, brain damaged primatologist client. Pictures are taken with a camera with a cracked lens and sent to the local paper. The paper runs the story. Really, what else are they going to write about in Northern Georgia? A national press corps bored by war and global climate change, picks up the story and runs with it. A press conference is called and… how will it end? We will know this afternoon because the real Matthew and Ricky are holding a press conference today to talk about the Bigfoot costume they have in a freezer…. I mean the body they found.

While my version of events is completely made up, I encourage you to watch the videos made by Matthew and Ricky and see how far off I really am. In one of them, they even have Matthew’s brother pose as a scientist to verify that their body is indeed a genuine Bigfoot. The problem is that he states he’s really interested in primate pathology and that’s why he flew in. Pathology is the study of diseases. Why would a scientist whose specialty is primate disease be interested in Bigfoot?

Here are the videos. They’re about 10 minutes each, but they are funny. Enjoy!

I should point out that I actually feel bad for these guys. I don’t think they know how far over their heads they’ve gotten. If I’m wrong, and they really do have Bigfoots body, I’ll donate a hundred copies of The Takers to libraries in the North Georgia area.

UPDATE*** Here’s a link to a Fox News story about the press conference.  The title says it all: Bigfoot Hunters Press Conference Reveals… Little