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Jim Shepherd on a Busy Weekend
Busy Weekend
This week, it's back to the "normal" stories of the outdoors after a hectic week of events, competitions and activities across the United States and around the globe.
The 2008 Olympic Games from Beijing wrapped up their shooting activities on Sunday, and, we're happy to report, the United States turned in their best performance in more than four decades. After the United States Olympic Committee (USOC) assigned USA Shooting a medal quota of six following a disappointing 2004 showing, many had thought the team to be in genuine trouble. However, the organization and shooters appear to have coalesced in 2008, bringing home six medals (their quota) including a pair each of gold, silver and bronze. Had it not been for a couple of errant shots, the United States had a chance for other medals, including a gold medal in the final event of the competition.
The Chinese shooting facilities, incidentally, impressed everyone in the shooting sports. They set the new standard for what it takes to be a "world-class shooting facility". Unfortunately, the venue also made it obvious the United States, despite having more shooters than any other nation in the world, lacks anything of that quality.
All-in-all, a very successful 2008 Olympic Games for USA Shooting.
Down in Columbia, South Carolina, meanwhile, the Forrest Wood Cup wrapped up the 2008 tournament fishing season.
And across the country, the annual Steel Challenge World Speed Shooting Championships were held in Piru, California. Although it's not an Olympic sport (although it should be), it's certainly the most entertaining of shooting competitions, with the world's best practical shooters racing for the title.
Only one big event since our last edition can be considered to be a bust. Friday afternoon, a trio of guys was supposed to unveil what was the "definitive proof of the existence of bigfoot". Not the monster truck, the sasquatch-bigfoot. You know, the legendary gigantic near-human that supposedly wanders around the little-traveled deep forests of the United States, scaring the heck out of unwary hunters, anglers, hikers and the occasional huckster looking to promulgate a hoax.
Friday's press conference, according to attendees and scientists who looked at the so-called evidence (a pair of blurry photos and some sketchy DNA analysis that showed both human and possum DNA) proved, well, absolutely nothing except maybe the expression that there's a sucker born every minute.
A pair of good-old-boys from Georgia, Matthew Whitton (a Clayton County police officer on disability after a being wounded in a robbery investigation) and Rick Dyer (a car salesman and tow truck operator), joined Californian Tom Biscardi (the owner of the bigfoottracker.com website - a total coincidence, of course) to tell the world they had more than proof-they had a bigfoot corpse.
Of course they didn't actually habeas a corpus, but hey, they had a couple of blurry photos that showed what was purportedly their bigfoot corpse stuffed into a freezer located at a secret location in Georgia. OK, maybe it looked like a wet gorilla suit in an icebox, but the freezer had, you know, broken down a couple of times, resulting in what might be called a "less than pristine" set of remains.
They didn't produce a body, weren't about to let anyone except the scientists they'd chosen examine the remains, and were keeping their bigfoot in a secret location. Conveniently, one of the scientists was "on vacation" and the other two were from Russia and had yet to arrive.
I'm not going to call the three con men, primarily because they didn't ask anyone to give them money (OK, maybe Biscardi did once charge visitors to his website $15 to see blurry video that was "actual video of bigfoot's(big feets?) captured by a woman he later said was "mentally ill" ).
But it doesn't look like Bushnell is passing the hat at their headquarters to come up with the million bucks they've offered for anyone producing definitive proof of the existence of bigfoot.
As always, from our global headquarters in its secret location (located somewhere in the southeast), we'll keep you posted.
--Jim Shepherd
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