The Bigfoot Hoax¶

The Bigfoot Hoax is the staged series of Bigfoot sightings, footprints and photographs around Dahlonega, Georgia, which Jan Martense's gold-mining ring used to discredit real sightings of escaped ape-men.


Type	Lore (cover story)
Aliases	fake Bigfoot sightings; faked Bigfoot prints; the Chewbacca figure; fake Bigfoot
Region	Dahlonega and Auraria, Georgia
Responsible	Jan's Conspiracy
First appearance	Appalachia 01 (sightings); Appalachia 02 (faked prints)

Overview¶

The team first meets Bigfoot as a local panic. Their case file lists four or five sightings in the last week, with a grainy Dahlonega Times photo. Huell Kendrick rolls well enough to learn that it looks like the Patterson-Gimlin film, but it could just as easily be a man in an ape costume. Sheriff Carter Burke says the recent sightings look "real fake" and are probably a prank. Kurt Larson tells him to report them all anyway, since a weirdo in an ape costume stealing a kid is not the craziest thing to cross his desk (Appalachia 01).

The staged sightings mingle with sightings of the real ape-men, and the investigators cannot tell them apart until Appalachia 09.

Evidence of staging¶

The clean prints¶

In Appalachia 02 the team searches near the circle where the Circle Chasers have been filming. Dick "The Biz" Baxter uses Investigate a Mystery and asks "What is being concealed here?" The answer is a pair of cleanly pressed giant footprints, about twice human size, with the edge of a sneaker print beside them and a cigarette butt. Kurt photographs everything and says he leans toward fake Bigfoot prints (Appalachia 02).

The naked, hairy figure¶

In Appalachia 04 Monica Cartwright tells the team that about a month before her son Gene vanished, a hairy, naked figure stood at the end of her driveway. She insists he "looked exactly like Chewbacca". He carried a backpack, was not facing the house, and got into the back of a black sedan. The sheriff dismissed the report, telling her she was drunk, which she admits she was (Appalachia 04).

The dead man in the costume¶

In Appalachia 06 Frotter Comstock reports a dead Bigfoot on his land and refuses to touch it. The "squatch" is a man in an expensive Chewbacca costume soaked in real blood. Andrew recognizes the wound from Academy photographs of gangland executions: the back of the head has been blown out. The scene also turns up:

a snapped plaster-of-Paris toe and fake Bigfoot footprints in mud, with a broken edge on one mold and no sign of its pair, so some equipment is missing;
the costume's bandolier taken off, with mud rubbed into the fur;
faded Navy tattoos, including a trident, which the Biz and Kurt read as SEAL insignia. Kurt checks him against his own old unit: "he's not UTAW, he's not one of my boys" (Dante (as Kurt Larson), Appalachia 06).

The team traces the costume to the photographer Derek Edwards. He says he bought it for cash at Comic-Con and sent it to be dry cleaned, and it vanished from the rack at Apollo's eight months ago. The dry cleaner recognizes the dead man as an out-of-town drifter who stood watching and was sometimes on a walkie-talkie. At the Spud Hut, the counter kid says the man ordered on three occasions, four, nine and 25 days earlier, and a plant auditor says he is not on the employee list. At the Motel and Suites he was registered as "John Doe" (Appalachia 06).

Going through the garbage thrown out from his room, the team finds snakeskin boots with a coil of animal hair tucked in one and a walkie-talkie in the other, plus plastic bags, duct tape, and a briefcase whose lining hides a slot for a high-caliber handgun and about $10,000 in hundreds and twenties (Appalachia 06).

Kurt's working theory is that someone hired a SEAL or Marine to fake Bigfoot, perhaps to keep people off Spud Hut land, while a real ape-man hybrid also exists (Appalachia 06). In Appalachia 07 Andre names the dead man as Troy Cleaver. The team spends the found cash on dinner, and Rita (as Andrew Howard), reporting to Big Bill, says "We're not surveilling Bill Clinton. We're surveilling dead Chewbacca." (Appalachia 07)

Explanation¶

In Appalachia 09 the worker Clive says the conspiracy had five people: himself, Jan, a mercenary who melted down the gold, and two bodyguards. When Kurt describes the dead man in the Bigfoot costume with ex-military tattoos, Clive realizes he must be the mercenary. He says he did not know where the mercenary got the costume and had told him "people was gonna know it was Chewbacca". Some workers had escaped and been seen, and Jan, worried about attention, wanted "some real fake ones to kind of discredit him" (Andre (as Clive), Appalachia 09).

Table running joke

Kurt dismisses the setup as "Scooby-Doo bullshit" and the players call the Circle Chasers the "Scooby gang" (Appalachia 02, Appalachia 06).

What remains unknown¶

Who shot the man in the costume. Kurt suggests Jan, but the episodes never confirm it.
Whether Monica Cartwright's hairy figure was the same man in the costume. Her account fits, but it is never stated.