It’s one thing to go on a nice walking holiday through beautiful Poland but it is another thing altogether to have that interrupted by some big hairy beast that no-one seems to be able to identify.

Such is the case for Piotr Kowalski, 27, from Warsaw who was enjoying his time in the Tatra mountains when one day he was peacefully filming an innocent mountain goat only to have is attention caught by some huge hairy creature emerging from behind some rocks.

"I saw this huge ape-like form hiding behind the rocks. When I saw it it was like being struck by a thunderbolt," he told the daily Superexpress.

"Coming from Warsaw, I never really believed the local stories of a wild mountain ape-man roaming the slopes. But, now I do."

Source: Austrian Times – Polish Yeti caught on film

The film has been handed over to the Nautilus Foundation whose president, Robert Bernatowicz says you can definitely see something much larger than a normal man moving on two legs.

At this point Yeti experts are headed to Poland to try and verify that this beast exists but in the meantime I’ll let you decide from what pictures we have.

As our first year comes to a close, we’ve loved sharing odd and funny stories with you this year. Here’s a look back at our 10 most popular odd and funny stories for 2008.

10: College Junior Enters NBA Draft. The Catch: He Has No Basketball Playing Experience

Zach Feinstein is the dark horse in this years NBA Draft, the dark horse because he’s managed to register himself despite having no serious basketball playing experience.

9: Darwin Awards 2008

To this day we’ve never been able to confirm the accuracy of this list (and a number of commenters called false) but it makes for good reading.

8: Lois K Feldman: Sex in a toilet at a football game ruined my life

Remember kids: don’t have sex in a toilet at a football game, particularly when your partner is at the game but not the one you are having sex with in the cubicle. That’s a life lesson right there.

7: SNL Jizz in my Pants

What more could one ask for but music and video about a getting horny…and having an accident.

6: Puppy Om Nom Nom Nom

Our only picture post in the Top 10, and it was worthy of the honor.

5: McDonalds sued over nude photograph sharing: Tina Sherman not lovin it

If you think you might lose your phone, best not to have naked pictures on it, or to leave it at a McDonalds.

4: Excuse me – there’s a freeway in my building

In Japan, buildings don’t get in the way of progress.

3: Visanthe Shiancoe’s Vikings Locker Room Exposure

Currently on Fox: full frontal football players.

2: Has Bigfoot been found?

This story gripped America, and even straight laced Web 2.0/ tech blogs sent people to cover the press conference. Not surprisingly, it was a fake.

1: Meet Elizabeth Frisinger: She lost her virginity and accidentally texted her dad

Suggested by one site to be a crafty fake, it was a great tale none the less.

The rubber bigfoot costume used earlier this year as evidence of bigfoot being found is up for auction on eBay, and bidding has passed $200,000.

The story of Bigfoot’s discovery made news headlines globally in August. Former police officer Matt Whitton and his friend, Rick Dyer, with the support of Bay Area Bigfoot researcher Tom Biscardi published a photo that allegedly showed Bigfoot in an icebox, complete with animal parts. The hoax didn’t stop there however, with Biscardi holding a media conference a week later, claiming that the first tests were inconclusive. The hoax was only discovered when independent testing found that the alleged body was nothing more than a Halloween costume.

The current owner of the “corpse,” William Lett, came into possession of the costume after lending Biscardi $50,000 to purchase it from the two who originally claimed to have found it.

The sale is being pitched as historic, and part proceeds from the sale will go to the Hoax Information Center.

You can follow the auction here.

Matthew Whitton and Rick Dyer went the full nine yards with a news conference, DNA tests (that showed nothing), and all sorts of empty promises last week. Of course, it was all a hoax — and, as many had initially suspected, the creature was no more than a frozen Halloween costume filled with some random roadkill.

Now, the company that helped publicize the whole debacle is demanding cash from the country bumpkins. Searching for Bigfoot paid the doofuses $50,000 for the rights to their story, and it’s not happy the whole thing’s been exposed as fraud.

The good ol’ boys from Georgia, for their part, now claim it was all just a big joke and that Searching for Bigfoot is to blame for “blowing it out of proportion.” They say they never did it to make money — even though they’re still holding onto that $50K that somehow made it into their hands. Oh yeah, and they’re also selling Bigfoot stuff on their own web site.

“It started off as some YouTube videos and a website,” one of them told Atlanta’s WSB-TV in his first interview this week. “We’re all about having fun.”

That same man — who was a police officer in Clayton County, Georgia — has been fired from the force as a result of the scam.

Smart fellers, those Georgians.

Two stories have gone completely viral in the blogosphere this month; one I played a part in, and one I didn’t. The first was the story of Dell’s application to trademark the term cloud computing, a trademark that was all but a done deal until the blogosphere errupted in a righteous fury over a company taking advantage. From the first post on Google Groups to its coverage on Elastic Vapor and onward, the story spread like wildfire, finally culminating in a preliminary denial of the trademark that Dell may or may not appeal. If I were to guess, I’d assume Dell would drop the application, not wanting to incite the anger of the tech community, nor let its competitors gain press for what’s certain to be an almost instantaneous protest of an appeal.

In the case of Dell, the outcome seems clear: Dell lost, the tech industry won, and the blogs and forums that pushed the story along certainly played a part. But what happens with a viral story that has no real winners?

The Bigfoot story may be that story. Since it’s first coverage (some of it here on The Inquisitr), it’s another story that spread at lightning speed, with one site after another either claiming the “find” was real, or expressing cynicism. By now, we all know that the story was a hoax, but there seems to be no winner. One of the individuals involved has lost his job as a Clayton County police officer due to his involvement. All three individuals are now known worldwide as liars. There seems to be no good that came out of the story.

Odds are that those involved in the Bigfoot hoax really had no idea how fast a story can spread. What seemed like a simple press release that might have gained a bit of local coverage snowballed, and the perpetrators of the hoax may simply have lost control of it. The idea of “going viral” is the dream of every entrepreneur, PR person, and blogger. It just may not have a good outcome.

Guest author Cyndy Aleo-Carreira is a contributing editor at The Industry Standard. She also writes about tech and start-up issues as well as freelance writing at Shakespeare I Ain’t, and does a weekly podcast with The Inquisitr’s own Duncan Riley at Things You Can’t Say About the Internet on Talkshoe.

The alleged bigfoot discovery last week has been exposed as a hoax. The Searching for Bigfoot site has released a statement saying that after gaining access to the Bigfoot body, they discovered that it was nothing more than a rubber suit.

A copy of a Fox News report in the video above.

It should really come as no great surprise that the whole thing is a hoax. We still don’t know exactly what the people behind it were aiming to achieve by the hoax, but it whole thing does prove something: we do want to believe on occasion that these things could be real.

In concluding the matter, we leave you with the best Bigfoot footage to date: Steve Austin v Sasquatch.

Tom Biscardi — CEO of Searching for Bigfoot, Inc, who also spoke at the event — said DNA tests had been conducted by Dr. Curt Nelson, a biologist at the University of Minnesota. The tests, he said, came back with three results: one showing inconclusive data, another indicating the creature was human, and another indicating it was a possum. That, Biscardi said, was probably because it had eaten a possum.

Biscardi mentioned that he was waiting for a friend of his — a scientist at Stanford — to get back from vacation before releasing any additional proof.

“Do you think these fellas would have come this far and put their reputations on the line if they didn’t have what they said they have?” Biscardi responded when a reporter challenged his claims.

When asked why they didn’t show the body itself, Whitten said they plan to — but they have to wait until they “get the right scientific crew there.”

“I’m telling you, it’s a body, and it’s not like a body you’ve ever seen,” Whitton commented.

“The first thing that pops into your head is ‘Bigfoot,’ and you take a step back and think, ‘you know, that can’t be.’ I didn’t believe in Bigfoot at the time,” he said.

The hunters first grabbed headlines Tuesday when they announced they had found the body in the woods of Northern Georgia. They released a couple of supposed Bigfoot photos, which quickly became Internet sensations.

It wasn’t long, though, before claims surfaced that the whole Bigfoot story was little more than a hoax. Some said the photos were created with a common Halloween costume. Then, word broke that the “doctor” seen confirming the find in a video was actually one of the men’s brothers:

Finally, skeptics said that Biscardi is a conman who has put forward false claims before.

So, the facts are on the table. The judgment call, now, is up to you.

Update: You can now watch the entire press conference here.

Perhaps not surprisingly, accusations are now surfacing that the North Georgia Bigfoot story is a hoax.

The evidence comes in on two fronts. The first accusation is that the alleged Bigfoot in the picture is actually a Halloween costume available from TheHorrorDrome.com. There are clear similarities, particularly with the nose, a comparison shot to the right.

The second part of the evidence comes with an admitted fraud from the so-called Bigfoot hunters who claimed to have found the body. Matthew Whitton and Ricky Dyer made a video showing a “Dr Paul van Buren” confirming the Bigfoot finding was legitimate, but it turns out the doctor was a fake and Whitton’s brother. They are still claiming that the corpse is real though:

Then there’s the involvement of Tom Biscardi, an active (but never once selected) candidate in the Democratic Party. According to bfro.net, Biscardi is a conman who has peddled a Bigfoot hoax before, and the press release scheduled Friday is a ploy to promote himself and nothing more.

Any so-called finding of Bigfoot, without scientific backup or proof, always sounds dubious, but I guess many of us wanted to believe, at least a little bit. The press conference is scheduled around 12 hours after this post is being written, so I guess we’ll have to wait and see, but certainly the signs aren’t good for it being real.

Every now and then in the life of a blog, you post something that drives traffic through the roof. In our case, my post last night about news of Bigfoot allegedly being found drove record traffic to The Inquisitr, delivering out first ever day in excess of 100,000 page views (we’re 3 months old). Traffic has been up the last two weeks across the board, but nothing close to this post, so it was completely unexpected, although always welcomed. The surge is starting to slow down giving me a little time to reflect on what we could have done better, and what I learned from the experience. Here’s my lessons from a Bigfoot traffic spike.

Always Be Prepared

A Digg front page early on aside, we’d never had a huge day like this before, and we weren’t prepared. I woke up to find JR emailing me to say that the site was throwing the occasional database error and was generally slow. At that stage the story had 30,000 page views and the peak was yet to come. The challenge was to maximize server response times and neutralize any time outs, thankfully though our MediaTemple Dedicated Virtual server never once crashed, so in some ways we were lucky, I’d hate to think what would have happened if I’d been on a standalone box or shared hosting plan.

The scramble was on. How do we bring the load down. I started with WP-Super-Cache, but this took some time to install because I couldn’t ftp into the site for a while due to the load. Got that installed…then nothing. Oh, you have to update your .htaccess file, did that, and likely due to a redirect plugin I had running, it messed with the site settings, causing posts to return a post not found error message. Scrub that, look again, eventually find Hypercache and install that. Not sure if it’s working or not, but something took the edge of the memory load, even if the CPU was still tracking 99-100%.

My error was not having something installed and ready in advance. I spent hours trying to fix a problem when I should have had something easily at hand. If you’re running a WordPress install, find a good cache solution, and have it ready, or if you’re confident with the settings, have it on all the time, like many of the bigger sites do.

Sometimes quirky works

I know a few people have had a chuckle today over The Inquisitr getting traffic from a Bigfoot story, but we’re fortunate that the site has always had a space for odd and funny stories. When I wrote the post, I had no idea it would deliver this sort of traffic, but it did in spades. Sometimes thinking outside the square and being quirky can pay off. The lesson is that sometimes it pays to be different.

You don’t have to be first, but early helps

We weren’t the first site with the bigfoot story, but we were among the first to report it as word got out. Being first and unique is an important part of defining any blog, but sometimes a good story should be reported even when you’re not first to it. I’d bet the traffic to the sites who had this first was much bigger again, but we still managed to stake our claim.

Sometimes Digg doesn’t matter

The interesting thing for me in the traffic is that the story never hit the top of any of the major social voting sites, including Digg. We got a bit of traffic from Reddit (3k) but the rest came from all over the place (Google was 20%). Now we’ll never say no to being Dugg, and we love Digg traffic, but ultimately sometimes Digg doesn’t matter in scoring a surge of traffic. The other interesting thing with the traffic, 21% was via the front page direct, not the post. This in part was driven by references in the press to inquisitr.com without links. People seem to have no issues with copy and pasting a URL directly in for more. Naturally we’d have liked hard links, but you take what you can get.

Intro post

When I realized that the traffic was increasing and a significant amount of it was hitting the front page first, I put a post up introducing the site to new readers, complete with link to the Bigfoot post they were looking for so they could easily find it, and left the post on top for 6 hours. It’s a strategy used by Darren Rowse and I have no idea yet whether it worked but it’s a decent idea that’s worth considering if you ever get a big traffic spike.

Conclusion

Naturally I hope we have more days like this to help pay the bills and to grow the site. Whether this spike results in more long term traffic for The Inquisitr is yet to be seen, although I’ve noticed with smaller hits that the base level on the slow days keeps showing bigger numbers so I’m hopeful that this is some welcome momentum for the site. The lessons learned for me are to be prepared, and keep at it because you never know when you’ll strike a hit post. It can be done, and anyone with enough smarts and some luck thrown in for good measure can do it.

For the Bigfoot Picture click here.

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The Bigfoot is claimed to have been found in the woods of northern Georgia by Matthew Whitton and Rick Dyer, and the claim is being supported by a Bay Area Bigfoot researcher Tom Biscardi, a multiple local Democratic candidate.

The press release as follows. A site claiming to have the first pics is down, but here’s the link in case it comes back up, although the pic top right is said to be one of the shots currently available. Other sites are suggesting this could be the “real deal;” who knows, we’ll have to wait for the press conference and the proof.

UPDATE: Cryptomundo just loaded for me and this is the pic they have, real or not real???

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
August 12, 2008
BIGFOOT BODY FOUND
DNA evidence and photo evidence to be presented at a
PRESS CONFERENCE
to be held on
Date: Friday, August 15, 2008
Time: From 12Noon-1:00pm
Place: Cabana Hotel-Palo Alto (A Crown Plaza Resort) 4290 El Camino Real, Palo Alto, California 94306

Searching for Bigfoot, Inc. Menlo Park, California
Tom Biscardi, CEO

BIGFOOT BODY FOUND – EVIDENCE AND DNA DETAILS TO BE PRESENTED AT A PRESS CONFERENCE ON FRIDAY, AUGUST 15th

FROM 12 N00N TO 1:00PM AT THE CABANA HOTEL-PALO ALTO IN PALO ALTO, CALIFORNIA

A body that may very well be the body of the creature commonly known as “Bigfoot” has been found in the woods in northern Georgia.

DNA evidence and photo evidence of the creature will be presented in a press conference on Friday, August 15th from 12 Noon to 1:00pm at the Cabana Hotel-Palo Alto at 4290 El Camino Real in Palo Alto, California, 94306. The press conference will not be open to the public. It will only be open to credentialed members of the press.
Here are some of the vital statistics on the “Bigfoot” body:
*The creature is seven feet seven inches tall.
*It weighs over five hundred pounds.
*The creature looks like it is part human and part ape-like.
*It is male.
*It has reddish hair and blackish-grey eyes.
*It has two arms and two legs, and five fingers on each hand and
five toes on each foot.
*The feet are flat and similar to human feet.
*Its footprint is sixteen and three-quarters inches long and five and three-quarters inches wide at the heel.
*From the palm of the hand to the tip of the middle finger, its hands are
eleven and three-quarters inches long and six and one-quarter inches wide.
*The creatures walk upright. (Several of them were sighted on the same day that the body was found.)
*The teeth are more human-like than ape-like.
*DNA tests are currently being done and the current DNA and photo evidence will be presented at the press conference on Friday, August 15th.