As promised: your morning Bigfoot roundup!

William Dranginis is skeptical—make that highly skeptical—about the claim by two men that they discovered a dead Bigfoot in the Georgia woods. Matthew Whitton, a police officer, and Rick Dyer, a former correctional officer, have stored the supposed Bigfoot in a cooler and released some inconclusive photos. They plan to unveil the body tomorrow at a press conference in Palo Alto, California.

The duo has enlisted Tom Biscardi, a noted Bigfoot researcher since the 1970s, as their defacto spokesperson. But Dranginis, the president of the Virginia Bigfoot Research Organization, points out that Biscardi has been involved in a hoax before. In 2005, he claimed he had captured a Bigfoot weighing over 400 pounds and standing 8 feet tall. Turned out to be a publicity stunt.

Which is what we’re betting this is. Dranginis directed us to a YouTube video that shows Whitton and Dyer welcoming a Dr. Paul Van Buren into their home to study the corpse. Watch the video here. (No shortage of plugs for their website, bigfoottracker.com, which advertises their “one of a kind BIGFOOT EXPEDITIONS!!!!!!!!”)

Some sharp folks quickly deduced that Van Buren was actually Whitton’s brother.

After watching the clip, we have a message for Whitton: Grade school jokes about nuts aren’t helping your credibility.

“They must be living in a different dimension,” says Dranginis, because he can’t see what good can come of this. Whitton, a police officer, has put his job in jeopardy if this turns out to be a prank.

Tomorrow will tell.

“Either they have a body or they’re going to look like the biggest fools in the world,” says Dranginis.

—Eric Wills

Hot for Creature Update: Bigfoot enthusiasts Matthew Whitton and Rick Dyer claim to have found the corpse of a Bigfoot creature in the woods of northern Georgia. You can read near-identical accounts here and here.

Check City Desk tomorrow for substantive analysis from William Dranginis, Bigfoot researcher and subject of Eric Wills‘ July 17 City Paper cover story.

—Ted Scheinman

On my way home from the National Arboretum just now, I passed a pretty grisly scene: the convenience store on the corner of Rock Creek Church and Warder, NW, has been burnt to a crisp. To wit:

The proprietors still don’t know what caused the fire, which witnesses say began around 3 o’clock this morning. By the time I got there, they were explaining to their employees that there’d be jobs in the future–they just didn’t know when. The fire department expects to have an explanation by early next week. As for the owners…well, all one of them could tell me was that “shit happens.”

Indeed. In the meantime, does anybody have a clue as to what the hell happened here?