Bones, Bigfoot, and Biscardi
Posted by: Craig Woolheater on February 8th, 2007
In a guest blog for Cryptomundo, Kathy Strain of the Alliance of Independant Bigfoot Researchers has offered her professional opinion of the skeleton that Tom Biscardi is claiming is a Bigfoot skeleton.
And to clarify as to the source of the photos, they came from Bigfoot Forums and SquatchDetective.com, not Biscardi’s site.
We wouldn’t want to violate Biscardi’s newly posted copyright disclaimer:
Copyright Searching for Bigfoot Inc., © Searching for Bigfoot Inc. 2006 / 2007
This entire website is covered by this copyright. Any unauthorized use of any materials on this site can and will be punished to the fullest extent of the lawSearching for Bigfoot
Photo One. Picture of the skeleton with 6-inch ruler.
Back in September, 2006, Tom Biscardi published information on his website about a bigfoot skeleton found somewhere near Paris, Texas. Photos posted were of an open pit…bones exposed to the full view of the camera…a lone 6-inch ruler laid next to a femur. Under the headline of “Possibly the Most Important Find in History,” Biscardi claimed that the skeleton was 9 feet, 3 inches tall.
Photo Two. Picture of the skeleton.
Humm…as a professional archaeologist/anthropologist, there is clearly something wrong here.
You can’t measure a disarticulated skeleton for height! Forensic Anthropologists use measurements from the long bones and a complicated table of figures to determine height. The six inch ruler next to the femur showed no extreme length. And the jawbone, taken for “further testing”, was clearly human…the worn teeth completely indicative of Native Americans. In fact, the bones were found by a man excavating for Native American artifacts.
Photo Three. Picture of the jaw.
Is Biscardi trying to pass off a human skeleton as a bigfoot?
Yes.
In October, 2006, Biscardi had the DNA results back and falsely claimed that “this preliminary information indicated that our find, although outwardly appearing to be human remains, was in fact NOT HUMAN!” (Note that Biscardi was now admitting the remains looked human). Biscardi added a caution to his statement, “keep in mind that this is only preliminary information and that it will take a lot more testing before we can say conclusively what our find may be. It does, however, get our attention peaked and gives us hope that we are just one step closer to solving the mystery surrounding our friend “Bigfoot”! It keeps us pushing the envelope and ignoring the discomforts and dangers of the field while we search.”
Yes, Tom, ignore laws, ethics, and morals while you search for bigfoot.
I posted an article about the obvious problems with this find on Melissa Hovey’s blog, “Search For Bigfoot.” Without reiterating my entire article there, let me say this as bluntly as I can: the skeleton was clearly human and it was against the law to excavate and remove the remains for testing without the proper permissions and permits. However, beyond the legal question, the moral and ethical issues this brings up is enormous. Why is this man still getting press? Why does anyone give him a platform from which to speak?
In January, Biscardi was the guest speaker at the International Bigfoot Society meeting and showed his new movie, Bigfoot Lives!, that includes footage of the skeleton. According to Ray Crowe, “A piece of bone was recovered for testing. C14 indicated 2900YBP, mitochondrial DNA indicated the skeleton was closely related to Homo erectus. Remaining material was returned after copy/casting due to NAGPRA and other federal regulations.”
Without directly saying it, Biscardi is admitting the skeleton is human. The Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) only applies to Native American remains…no need to return the bones if not human. Humans and erectus are both in the Homo line, so technically, any DNA from a human skeleton would be “related to Homo erectus.” Biscardi would probably call this semantics…I call it being dishonest. But then again, human burials don’t sell videos; made-up bigfoot ones do.
Photo Four. Top graph shows the graph from Biscardi’s sample; bottom is human.
Kathy Strain is the Forest Archaeologist for the Stanislaus National Forest in Sonora, California. She has a M.A. in Anthropology and has been investigating bigfoot for many years. Her main research interest involves the traditional Native American stories involving the “Hairy Man,” as well as the application of archaeological methods to the study of bigfoot.
She is a professional archaeologist/anthropologist in charge of Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) for her forest, and the co-author of the standard NAGPRA agreement used by the U.S. Forest Service and Native American Tribes.
She is also one of the founders of the Alliance of Independant Bigfoot Researchers.
Co-founder of Cryptomundo in 2005.
I have appeared in or contributed to the following TV programs, documentaries and films:
OLN's Mysterious Encounters: "Caddo Critter", Southern Fried Bigfoot, Travel Channel's Weird Travels: "Bigfoot", History Channel's MonsterQuest: "Swamp Stalker", The Wild Man of the Navidad, Destination America's Monsters and Mysteries in America: Texas Terror - Lake Worth Monster, Animal Planet's Finding Bigfoot: Return to Boggy Creek and Beast of the Bayou.
I did not know about this guy Tom Biscardi until I found Cryptomundo. He sounds like a charlatan. Is there any low to which he will not stoop?
When I read “related to Homo erectus” I called BS.
I see this strange creature every morning that’s related to Homo erectus. I see him brushing his teeth in my bathroom window. Video coming, $10 each.
Desecrating graves is not bigfoot research.
Good morning Cryptos…
Excellent commentary Miss Kathy, disturbing Native American burial sites is outrageous, unforgivable and illegal.
live and let live….
ole bub and the dawgs
I would love (actually hate) to see Biscardi come to Oklahoma and try that crap. Native Americans in Oklahoma would take care of him real quick for digging up a grave.
Unfortunately, as long as Biscardi gets press, he is going to be one of the faces asscociated with Bigfoot Research, no matter what we, as a community think about him.
Has there been any word of Federal investigation of his digging up the grave?
Wow, Kathy interesting commentary. TB really seems to have pushed the envelope of good taste with this one. Something that should really be raising people’s red flags is the blatant dishonesty and obfuscation of DNA test results which are considered by many to be the end all be all of hard evidence. It is going to make even DNA test results suspect if people start behaving this way. This guy is trouble for anyone who wants to present any kind of respectable image for Bigfoot studies. I dread to see what is coming out next.
I am not sure if this guy has more moves than a trained dancer, or a hopping rabbit!
The good news is it WILL all catch up to him, The Bad news, it casts a bad light on everyone researching BF.
This guy gives cryptozoology a bad name.
That’s just grave robbing! Something that has been happening to Native Americans for far too long.
We need to break bad habits and respect the dead.
Which is why I’m still on the fences about archeology in general. It all comes down to scientific gain or ethics.
It’s clear he just wants money.
Has anyone thought about contacting the authorities in Texas and turning him in? The evidence is on videotape in his movie, so he has already incriminated himself.
The more air-time, publicity, notoriety he gets the worse it gets. Somebody beat him with a scientific or a legal shovel and knock him down a few notches. Oh, and the
“Copyright Searching for Bigfoot Inc., © Searching for Bigfoot Inc. 2006 / 2007
This entire website is covered by this copyright. Any unauthorized use of any materials on this site can and will be punished to the fullest extent of the law”
Nice touch, make sure you follow all the laws of the land as well Mr. Biscardi!!!!!!
Just from these two pictures alone, we can estimate the skeleton length in place. The second picture is taken with the skull at the left end. The tape measure shows 1 ft tick marks. The right end of the tape measure is stretched about 3 ft out beyond the bottom of the feet, apparently in order to misrepresent the actual length. Debris is thrown on the foot area to conceal the exact location of the feet, which appears to be deliberate. But from the 1st picture, we can estimate where the feet are. Scaling the upper and lower long leg bone length, I estimate 3′-3″, which is almost exactly what my own measurement is. I am 5′-10″ tall.
JJohnson1 is completely right in turning this imbecile in. Desecrating a grave is low as you can possibly go. Even TB has excelled himself this time. The authorities should really put a stop to this. Either that or had him over to the descendants of the tribe the remains belonged to. I doubt even Biscardi could sleaze his way out of that.
I did some checking and found that it is a requirement, like Kathy stated, for Biscardi to have had a permit in order to recover the remains that he removed from the grave. See Indian Burial and Sacred Grounds Watch.
Specifically, he could be guilty of:
Texas’ Criminal Mischief Penal Code 28.03(f), which states:
f) An offense under this section is a state jail felony if the damage or destruction is inflicted on a … human burial.
and
Section 43.08 of the Penal Code which states:
An offense under this section is a state jail felony for any abuse of a human corpse.
hey craig those bones photos look very interesting indeed. but this biscardi situation is getting deeper etc everday. thanks bill
Brudder.
I guess it would be a Slow News Day most days in crypto if you didn’t put stuff like this up.
And maybe it will serve a purpose. Maybe people who think that crypto is fruitcake will come to this site and go away thinking, well, no, it’s not fruitcake. But it HAS fruitcakes, and hey, they seem to know it and react the right way. Might be something to this.
One can hope. 🙂
Hi,
It’s me Tara, the bigfoot lady from Happy Camp. I know that I very publicly and very loudly complained at the treatment I got from GABRO and Tom Biscardi two summers ago, and I feel a little embarrassed at the stink I made except that when I go and read all this new…”news” of the underhanded things he is capable of it just gets me all riled up again.
Last week I found out that my community has lost a cute landmark made for the people of this place to enjoy, by pictures Tom took while he was here in an area he did not have permission to be taking pictures. Someone big and rich enough to stop Tom from exploiting serious scientific discovery would be a sight for these sore eyes.
Tom Bascardi is treading on thin ice with his latest shenanigans. He’ll eventually fall in and when he’s pleading for help I’ll gladly throw him an anchor.
Another play out of the bigfoot hoax-per-view play book.
Just like how Biscardi keeps claiming photos of Peggy Marx in a rather poor monkey suit is a real bigfoot long enough for some ignorant squatchers to believe it he will do the same with the hand and the skeleton.
Biscardi is an idiot, a looser and a scammer. He should be prosecuted for his coast to coast am bs he pulled last year.
Someone please tape him working through a scam so he can be put away. After all, conspiracy is the wonderful catchall of the judicial system
Hmmmm…..
The skeleton looks hardly robust enough to me to hold up an 800 pound frame, much less be 9 1/2 ft. tall.
Seems a shame to hurt actual bigfoot research with a sham like this.
I was willing to give Biscardi a degree of benefit of doubt over this one, reasoning, just because someone once attempted to pass off a man in a brinylon monkey suit as Bigfoot, doesn’t mean everything he comes up with must be fake.
I was even willing to credit the possibility he’d uncovered one of these legendary giant humans referred to in many mythologies, including that of Native Americans.
Then I spotted what it was that bugged me about the picture of the leg bones; it wasn’t the titchy ruler, because that might have just been to enhance and underline the length of the bones: it was the way the girder or metal strut thingy is allowed to obscure the view of the bones in the close up, and the fact a tiny amount of strategically impacted soil hasn’t been removed from exactly the same point on each of the bones precisely where more bone would have to be added if they were normal length bones being disguised to appear considerably longer.
I rather liked Kathy Strain’s interpretation of the statement that the DNA was “closely related to Homo erectus” (viz., that since modern humans are closely related to H. erectus, this was a deliberately misleading way of saying “it’s human”).
For what it’s worth, Neanderthal DNA has been sequenced, but so far as I know none from H. erectus. (H. erectus is older than H. neandertalensis, so the chances of getting readable DNA out of erectus bones would be slimmer than that of getting Neanderthal DNA, and my understanding is that getting the Neanderthal sequences was just at the edge of the feasible.) So I would immediately doubt any claim that a DNA test showed a specimen to be specifically related to Homo erectus: closer to erectus than to modern Human. The information needed to make the comparison just isn’t, so far as I know, available.
I love the scientific objectivity of his title “Possibly the Most Important Find in History”!
Well when the likes of T.B., M.M., E.B. are on the research team it seems that laws are broken or the truth is stretched or people are intimated or real bad fake pictures or body parts show up……sorry I’ll wait for the real truth provided by good research.
Neither Matt Moneymaker nor Erik Beckjord are involved in this issue with Tom Biscardi. Tom gets sole credit.
Buscardi–what a time-waster. Who supports this guy?
Yeah, someone prosecute him- unlicensed digging of indigenous remains could get him in big trouble. And more than that I think someone should check out whether Biscardi actually purposefully damaged the remains. Not saying he did, but, for instance, the fact that the face portion of the skull seems to have been substantially damaged is kind of handy if you are trying to disguise the obviously human nature of the skeleton.
And apart from that, this is just an awful excavation. There is debris everywhere (including what appears to be bone splinters, although it could be wood), there is no sign of a standard archaeological or forensic recording system. Basically this is a farce.
While, as I’ve said before, archaeological remains might be one of our best sources of evidence, we really need to leave that to professionals.
I shudder to think what an idiot like Biscardi might do if, god forbid, he did actually come across a sasquatch skeleton. My bet is, he’d destroy half of the useful information, and contaminate the rest.
Amazing how much of our collective energies are wasted in dealing with TBS – The Beckardi Syndrome.
To visitors reading this, please realize that Biscardi and his ilk are fringe elements in any Quest in which they appear – the wild, off-the-wall, idiosyncratic (“Deviating from the customary: bizarre, cranky, curious, eccentric, erratic, freakish, odd, outlandish, peculiar, quaint, queer, quirky, singular, strange, unnatural, unusual, weird…” Answers.com), unscientific, unprofessional side of the whole band of “enthusiasts”, the extreme end of the bell-curve, if you will.
There are also true scientific intellectuals on the other end of the curve, obscure folks who gather information for years and then write laborious tomes in a garret somewhere in Illinois, which are printed by tiny Psychology publishers in Portugal eleven years later, and which nobody ever reads.
Then there’s the rest of us, gathered in a disorganized heap forming the middle of the curve, serious and educated and intense and curious and creative folks who are sincerely interested in the Quest, in one way and to one degree or another – people who are just as shocked as newbies are at the unbelieveable antics of both fringe elements.
One would hope that we all understand this factoid, and that we maintain a holistic (“Emphasizing the importance of the whole and the interdependence of its parts. Concerned with wholes rather than analysis or separation into parts…” Answers.com) viewpoint, as we enter this mystic realm.
When tribes can hold up legitimate, authorized, archeological research for years with contentions over proper ownership, why can’t someone nail this bozo for the crime he’s so boldy filmed himself doing? Unless, and this is a big if…unless he DID get the right permissions to dig this site (Although how I wouldn’t even begin to tell you, I would think you’d at least have to be vaguely qualified to conduct an archeological excavation), which is why he so covertly mentions that the remains had to be returned due to NAGPRA regulations. Surely even if he did return the remains, but hadn’t gotten permission to take them in the first place, he would still be punishable in some fashion.
Well, if nothing else, we can now add “Graverobber” to our descriptions of this pathetic huckster…
If you can’t find the site, then you can’t prosecute him for anything. Secondly, if you do not have access to the alleged bones, then you cannot prosecute him. Biscardi is already pronouncing publicly that the government says that the side does not exist. So he is covering his bases in advance. No body then no crime. The condition of the wood protecting the grave, tended to indicate that the grave had been dug for at least 5 years. The wood was in an advance state of decay. So Biscardi did not likely have anything to do with the excavation itself. He allegedly borrowed some bones and then apparently replaced them, so there was no ultimate theft according to his statements. So any legal action in regard to these bones, appears to have some difficulty in prosecuting. So he skated on this one.
silvereagle – Biscardi can claim anything that he wants to, however there is no proof that the “government says the site does not exist” nor that he returned the bone (and it seems very odd that there is no mention of the return of the remains until after I brought it up in my article on Search for Bigfoot blog back in January, which is after he stated the government had taken over the site…so both events can’t be true). The only proof of anything is that he taped the excavation and is selling the DVD. Since he did not have a permit to do an excavation or to remove, be in possession of, and/or test any remains, all the evidence needed is right there.
(P.S. I don’t believe the excavation is five years old. Biscardi stated that the person who found the body found it while hunting for arrowheads, indicating the find was very recent. Wood could be there for a variety of reason…placed there at time of burial, later addition to the site (trash) or an old piece of wood used during the excavation).