By Sharon Hall
Published:
Wednesday, January 26, 2011 8:46 AM EST
Although it's not writ in stone, Animal Planet is making plans to visit Lumpkin and Union counties. They are stalking the legend of Bigfoot.
The Discovery Channel, which produces Animal Planet, called local resident Mary Scott, requesting an interview with her. Scott, as well as a Lumpkin County Sheriff's Office deputy with whom she was riding during a Citizens Law Enforcement Academy ride-along, reportedly saw a Bigfoot about a year-and-a-half ago and captured it on the dashboard cam.
Scott said they were out in the Frogtown area when the sighting occurred.
“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,” Scott says. “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.'”
Realizing the event had been recorded by the patrol car's dash cam, Scott and the officer returned to the Sheriff's Office where they viewed the happening on a larger screen.
“We were both just shocked,” Scott says. “It was really tall, and it really looked like the pictures you've seen of Bigfoot.”
The film found it's way onto the Internet, and that's how the Discovery Channel tracked Scott down, she says.
“I told them it all happened in seconds. It just came and went,” she says.
The TV representative told Scott they are planning to visit the area in February and plan to camp out in the area where she and the deputy made the sighting.
They may change their minds, however, when they learn that Sheriff Stacy Jarrard claims to have proven the sighting to be a hoax. Jarrard said he went out the next day to question homeowners in the area. At the first house he stopped at, he says, there were two young men, students at North Georgia College & State University, who were “acting really nervous. You could see their hearts were beating really fast,” he says.
The two did not admit to the prank right away, but later in the week they copped to one of them donning a gorilla suit and running across the road in front of vehicles on the night in question. Jarrard says he even has a photograph of the two boys with the gorilla suit.
If Animal Planet does decide to not to visit Lumpkin, they will probably still most likely visit the North Georgia area.
“They sent us a letter requesting to film at Track Rock in Union County,” said John Campbell with the National Forest Ranger Station in Blairesville. “The area is an archeological site, and is purported to have the footprint on Bigfoot.”
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