Robert Lindsay Concedes: Rick Dyer's "Hank" Bigfoot Is 100% Fake

So, Robert Lindsay (a staunch supporter of Rick Dyer's hoax)  left us a voicemail today asking us to call him back. Here's how the conversation went this morning:

• Me: Sup, man.
• Robert Lindsay: Rick Dyer's Bigfoot has been proven to be fake!
• Me: That's news?
• Robert: Go check out my recent article. It's fake! But I have a theory that Dyer might be hauling around a fake body because the government refused to give him permission to tour the country with a real Bigfoot.
• Me: Oh, really? Is that what you believe now? We've been saying it's fake the whole time, man.
• Robert: Yep. Christopher Noel and I still believe he has the body somewhere.
• Me: Robert. Do you know that he [Dyer] said the same thing in the 2008 hoax? -- Dyer claimed the government took his "real" body and he was forced to put the monkeysuit in the freezer? He's taken you for a ride.
• Robert: You win, man.
• Me: I'm going to repost your blog, and you know what I'm going to put in the title? "Robert Lindsay Concedes: Rick Dyer's "Hank" Bigfoot Is %100 Fake".
• Robert: Sure. I'm fine with that. You guys win.

Here's a snippet from Lindsay's article:

Smashing news on the Rick Dyer story – the biggest news so far! The object that Rick Dyer is currently hauling around the country dubbed Hank has been proven to be 100% fake!

Very recently, two men who had been harboring suspicions that the object in the box on tour was fake pulled the lid off the box and examined the fake Hank with their own hands. Their suspicions had been building for some time, and finally they both just said, “Screw this, we’re taking the cover off!” They removed the cover and promptly busted the case. They immediately realized that it was fake. The hair is some sort of camel hair, as the haters have been saying all along. And the body is totally synthetic, except that hair may be real hair from a camel. Apparently just bending the feet is enough to tell the thing is fake. They are pliable…”like foam rubber,” in the words of one of the men who examined the fake Hank.

However, everyone around Hank was fooled until the cover came off.

The haters and even some Dyer supporters have said all along that the face/head that Musky described after his visit looks very little like the face/head of the fake tour object. For starters, we can look at the hairline.

I know the name of one of the men who opened the box, but I cannot reveal it. I do not know the name of the other man, who I will call X. Andrew was present at the box opening too and immediately left for the airport to fly home. Dyer is lying when he says the Andrew left because his Visa was up. Instead, Andrew left because he either thought that the whole thing was a hoax or at least that Rick had been lying to him and leading him along all this time. Rick definitely made Andrew look pretty bad – made him look like a cheap huckster con artist. That’s what Rick is, but is that what Andrew is too? Perhaps not.

Those who found the body to be fake yesterday are preparing a public statement to be released soon, possibly within 24 hours.

If you look at Dyer’s mysterious statement from seven hours ago on his Facebook page where he hinted that it might be a replica and then added cryptically, “Would they let me travel around with the greatest discovery of the century in back of a $12,000 trailer?”

I predict that Dyer’s damage-control strategy will be this: “Did they give me a copy of the real Bigfoot without me knowing?”

The haters were correct to identify this fake Hank as fake. They pointed out the many ways in which it was obviously fake to them, and it turns out that they were correct. That’s some great investigate reporting by them, and they were right in the end. Kudos especially to Randy Filipovic’s blog who pioneered the investigation of the fake Hank. In addition, some of the haters’ other questions are starting to make sense now. If the tour object was real, why let Rick construct that cheap box in his garage rather than have one made professionally with fool-proof security built in.

No one knows what Rick picked up in Washington at the start of the year, whether it was the real body or this fake. If he picked up the fake, then it is quite possible that Chris Russell may have made it.

Is Dyer guilty of fraud for touring with the fake object? Well, his tack on the tour has been “Believe it or not…Is it real? You be the judge,”so that may be enough to let him off the hook.

[via Robert Lindsay]