The man who claimed to have shot and killed Bigfoot in South Texas is now admitting that both his claim and the preserved "body" he charged admission to view was a hoax.
Rick Dyer, who told KSAT's Tim Gerber in February 2013 that he makes a living tracking the mythical creature and runs a website called BigfootTracker.com, said he shot and killed Bigfoot in Northwest San Antonio.
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That website appears to no longer be in service.
"Bigfoot is 100 percent real. There's no question about that," Dyer said at the time. "I'm going to go down in history as the best Bigfoot tracker in the world."
But now, Dyer's business partner, Andrew Clacy, has admitted that the whole venture was a hoax.
Clacy emailed a statement to KSAT Monday saying Dyer confessed to him that he paid for a fake Bigfoot body to be constructed by a company out of Spokane, Wash.
"Mr. Dyer needed me to believe the body was real so I would contact the media and help make him money, which I did," Clacy said in the statement.
Dyer held the "body" in Las Vegas until February 2014, when he returned with it to San Antonio, charging adults $10 and children $5 to take the tour of a rented trailer to see the body. He set up the trailer in a Home Depot parking lot at Loop 1604 and Highway 151 near where he claimed to have shot the mythical creature.
"If you think it's a hoax, then you go home and at least you got to see this, and if you think it's real, then that's great -- you know the truth," Dyer said in February.
Dyer has been accused of being involved an a previous Bigfoot hoax. He and others claimed they had a body in 2008.
"When I hoaxed in 2008, I did not believe in Bigfoot," Dyer told Gerber in February. "I thought Bigfoot was the same thing as a tooth fairy or a unicorn."
Dyer even said after the hoax, he starting taking people on Bigfoot tracking expeditions just to make a buck, but the more time he spent in the woods listening to other people's stories, he began to believe.