Hey Vern! I Got Me a Skunk Ape in Muh Cooler...

With Matthew Whitton's and Rick Dyer's amazing "skunk ape in a deep freezer" photograph blowing the lid off the decade's old bigfoot legend, a floodgate of further sightings has opened across the country.

"I have a refrigerator out back." said Derrick Polmang of rural Shipshewana, Indiana. "I keep my extra beers in it. Leftover chicken wings. Muskmelon. You name it. Well, I go out to it late last night and instead of my beers, there was a yeti in there."

A dead yeti like the one in the Whitton/Dyer photograph?

"No, he was still alive." said Polmang. "He'd drunk half my beers and near ate my whole cantaloupe. Guess I spooked him, because he took off running right when he saw me."

Just fifteen miles away in nearby White Pigeon, Michigan, trash collectors Marc Flynn and Reggie Kawatoyo claimed a similar experience.

"We got a bulk pickup call out on Fawn River Road." explained Flynn. "An old washer and dryer set. We went to pick them up early. About 4:30 this morning. But when we showed up, we saw three, maybe four sasquatch sitting up on the washer with it running. We didn't get an exact count because they scattered once our headlights hit them."

"They'd somehow rigged a generator up to the machines." said Kawatoyo. "That's how they got them running."

Perhaps as scared of the bigfoots as the bigfoots were of them, the two garbage collectors left the appliances, but returned for them later after sunrise.

"They left footprints all around the area." said Kawatoyo.

"And tufts of hair stuck in the plate gaps." added Flynn. "And this."

Flynn held up what looked like a cone-shaped dirt clod with various particles sticking out. Upon closer inspection one could make out strands of hair, melon seeds, little chips of bone and part of a Butterfinger wrapper.

"It's a dingleberry." said Kawatoyo. "We think it fell off of one as they made their getaway."

The men have contacted the anthropology department at Michigan State University where they plan to have the dingleberry studied. The grayish-brown turd measures a remarkable five inches in length and provides enough girth to give researches plenty of material to dissect.

While not uncommon for Bigfoot sightings to turn up in the Midwest, the creatures are far more often spotted whiling about in the rugged terrain of the Pacific Northwest. And sure enough, Martha McMurty of Humptulips, Washington reported another appliance-related sasquatch encounter the same day as the White Pigeon sighting.

"I was on the hiking trail that goes behind my property, coming back to my house, when I see a sasquatch carrying a Kitchen Aid mixer. At first I was petrified. I think we both were, because she stopped to look at me, too. And then I noticed the mixer was a coppertone Custom Metallic Series and I can assure you, nobody but nobody in the central county area has one of those but me."

McMurty said she tried to scare the creature off, hoping it would release the $500 mixer, but no such luck. The bigfoot only seemed to cling to its prize all the tighter as it disappeared into the woods.

"She knew it was mine." said McMurty with more than a touch of bitterness.

Down the coast, along the banks of Cullaby Lake, Oregon, came a similar account, just two days later. Russell Lepke of Astoria, Oregon said he had come to the lake to go bird watching. He was in the woods along the eastern bank of Cullaby, when he happened upon a sasquatch banging its hands against an old abandoned stove.

"He was sort of playing it like a set of bongos." said Lepke. "I came up on him from behind. He was beating that stove and singing like... Ka ka ka, muchoo rephundee... Then the next thing I know, I blacked out."

Lepke thinks he may have been clubbed over the head by a second, unseen sasquatch. But by the time he came to, both the first sasquatch and the stove were gone.

"That was uncalled for." said Lepke. "I understand these are solitary creatures and they probably don't like people intruding into their home. But I would've been happy to leave quietly. They didn't have to sucker punch me."

Fellow Oregonian and bigfoot expert, Mark Trumpman, a professor of paranormal studies at Clackamas Community College, remains skeptical of these various encounters.

"The Michigan account sounds true." said Trumpman. "They have a dingleberry. That's something. But these other stories have all the earmarks of folks trying to jump aboard a publicity train."

But how does one explain the missing Kitchen Aid mixer in Washington, the stolen beers in Indiana and the lump of Mr. Lepke's head?

"It's not hard to tell if you've been attacked by bigfoot." said Trumpman. "They always follow the same M.O."

How to tell if you've been attacked by bigfoot.

Trumpman theorized that Mr. Lepke may have simply fainted and dreamt the encounter while McMurty and Polmang are probably just compulsive liars.

And what about Matthew Whitton and Rick Dyer, the intrepid bigfoot hunters who started the rash of sightings?

"They're not telling the truth, either." said Trumpman. "I don't believe they found a dead skunk ape and put it in their deep freeze. The surviving skunk apes wouldn't have let them get away with it."

Then what about the famous picture of what appears to be a bigfoot carcass stuffed into a cooler?

"That's a real picture of a real skunk ape." conceded Trumpman. "But they didn't put him in it. I'm willing to bet that the skunk ape got himself stuck in the freezer and when he couldn't get himself out, he tore loose his own entrails out of frustration. And then Whitton and Dyer probably found him as is."

But isn't that splitting hairs so to speak? The Georgia hunters found a dead bigfoot. Whether it was in the cooler already or the men put it into the cooler is immaterial. The point is that they have a body.

Trumpman disagrees.

"Anybody can find a dead sasquatch. No big deal. But when you start to fudge the details, that's when the skeptics start wagging their fingers. Whitton and Dyer set the field of bigfoot study back several decades with their little half truths. And I, for one, will never forgive them."