The video below was shot May 2009 in Lumpkin County, Georgia by a Lumpkin County Sheriff’s Department patrol car dashcam and features a very quick glimpse of a creature that some have said resembles the legendary Bigfoot running across a dark and desolate road in the Frogtown area of Georgia. In the car were a county deputy and Mary Scott, a civilian who was riding in the car as part of a Citizens Law Enforcement Academy ride-along. The sheriff said the video is a hoax, but many feel the video evidence may have been brushed off or worse, covered up.
According to Mrs. Scott:
“We were going about 55 mph on a curvy road. It was really late-after midnight, I think. We hadn’t passed any other cars, and this thing came out of nowhere. The officer hit the brakes and we both jumped out. We looked on both sides of the road but didn’t see anything, and we looked at each other kind of like, ‘You saw that, didn’t you? I saw that.’”
The creature is hard to see in the video even with post processing added to enhance the view. As the sheriff’s patrol car approaches a bend, you will see a dark set of skidmarks on the road. Just at the edge of the patrol car’s headlights, you will see a dark biped creature entering the road from the right and running across the road, just past a guardrail on the left-hand side of the roadway.
According to the Lumpkin Country sheriff Stacy Jarrard, the creature running across the road was a teenage boy wearing a gorilla suit. He says he discovered the hoaxer after going door-to-door in the area and noticing two teenagers who “acted very nervous”. The teenagers, college students at nearby North Georgia College and State University, did not immediately admit to the stunt but reportedly approached Sherriff Jarrard about a week after the sighting, admitting it was them. Jarrard says he took a photo of the two boys and the suit.
Hoax, yes? But wait. Researchers began to question Jarrard’s claims that the video was a hoax. First, the creature ran very fast – about 10 meters in 1.4 seconds – faster than a human in a gorilla suit should be able to run. And the area where the sighting occurred was very remote – why would two teenagers choose to prank on a road that saw very little traffic late at night? More importantly, why would nobody ever publicly admit to the hoax?
In 2011, an Animal Planet documentary team, assisted by Matt Moneymaker of Bigfoot Researchers Organization (BFRO), investigated the sighting and found no teenagers had lived in the area during the time the video was shot. Thinking Jarrard’s story sounded unlikely, he requested a copy of the photo he reportedly took of the boys and the gorilla suit – he refused to provide one. Investigators questioned other sheriff department personnel and to their surprise, none had heard of any photographic evidence nor reports of teenagers pulling a prank. A member of the BFRO documentary team wrote:
“None of the other sheriffs had heard about this story that Jarrard told to a reporter. It seems he came up with the story to quell any fear that local people might have about a monster in the woods, and to prevent hunters from going to look for one.”
Whether it’s a hoax or not is still up in the air. Check out the Lumpkin County dashcam video below and decide for yourself.