9. Bigfoot Lives! No, Really!

Bigfoot claims are a dime a dozen, and there was no particular reason to believe this one. But Rick Dyer and Matt Whitton seemed so sure: "Everyone who has talked down to us is going to eat their words," predicted Whitton confidently at a press conference, in which the pair of amateur Bigfoot hunters claimed they had found the corpse of a Sasquatch in the woods of northern Georgia. More than that, they claimed to have the body itself, releasing photos of what appeared to be a mass of matted hair and bloody flesh stuffed into a large freezer. As the "evidence" thawed, though, researchers revealed that "Bigfoot" was, in fact, a rubber gorilla suit stuffed with roadkill and other animal remains. Days later Dyer and Whitton, who was fired from his job as a police officer as a result of the hoax, said they had intended the stunt as a joke all along; as Dyer told a CNN affiliate, "Everyone knew we were lying."

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