Back in 1992, I was teaching high school students. I had a bunch of boys in my class who had a 'hobby' they invented all by themselves, the goofs. They had got their hands on some gorilla suits. How, I don't know. Why, I don't know. But they saw opportunity, and they devised a plan to go out late at night in the winter and hide in a ditch dressed in this / these suits. They would wait for a car to pass along the country road then just as the headlights would hit them, jump out and run past it into woods. The car would stop. Then, the OTHER boys would come running out of the ditch acting like they were chasing the beast.
They would say, "OMG! Did you see that DOG?? It was HUGE!!" This would make the car's occupants say, "That was no dog! It ran on two feet!" Then, they would suggest it was Bigfoot. This game had variations. Sometimes, they would don the costume and run around making hooting noises in farmer's fields. They were idiots, yes. They could have been shot. The object of the game was to convince people they had seen this Bigfoot thing. This went on for months.
So.....one day in the teachers' lounge, there was a copy of the Wall Street Journal with a Bigfoot story about our town right on the front page. Really? I went and got these kids out of study hall and stuck the paper under their noses. They looked sort of worried, but very proud as well. LOL They read the map of where the sightings were and said," This is us, this is us, this was us, but that...not us." LOL
So, all the fuss that made some Bigfoot guy come down and make hooting noises in the fields around here was started by kids in a gorilla costume. And they STILL report this as a bigfoot hotspot.
Another one....
2) FEBRUARY 2005 JUST EAST OF ALLIANCE, OHIO ON U.S. ROUTE 62, MAHONING COUNTY
In late April of 2005 I along with Terry and Treba Jahn as well as Sarah Weiler went to Alliance, Ohio to speak to an eyewitness of an alleged Bigfoot sighting. Dave (not his real name) reported to Sarah via the Operation Appalachia web site that he had a sighting in mid-February of 2005. He reports that he was heading east on US 62 just leaving the Alliance city limits and entering Mahoning County. It was between 11 and 11:30 p.m. He had just gone underneath a railroad overpass and was accelerating to the posted speed limit of 55 mph. He had just left the confines of the city lights when he spotted something on two legs crossing route 62 in front of him. He estimated that it was between five and six feet in height. I asked Dave if it was on two or four legs, and all three times I asked, he replied by saying "two legs". I inquired about this because if it had been on four legs, I could have thought it was a black bear crossing the road in front of Dave. Apparently, it was not. Since that day of the interview at a donut shop in Alliance, none of us has ever heard from Dave again.
I just found this online and pasted it because this is within WALKING distance of my house. But, I'm pretty certain the kids were up to their same tricks. A good joke is hard to pass up. Plus, there are fewer black bear sightings here than Bigfoot ones! Neither are native to my town.
