The jig is up for the two hikers from Georgia who said they happened upon a body of a Sasquatch.

It didn’t exactly take a crack team of forensics investigators to identify the "cadaver."

When confronted about their deception over the weekend, Rick Dyer and Mathew Whitton apparently admitted that their prize finding is really a costume. The deceptive duo has since run off with an undisclosed sum of advance money they got from Searching for Bigfoot, Inc., the group that held Friday’s ridiculed press conference in Palo Alto, Calif.

The details of the hoax have emerged in statement posted on Searching for Bigfoot, Inc.’s Web site, written by fellow Bigfoot aficionado Steve Kulls, the executive director of Squatchdetective.com. Searching for Bigfoot, Inc., had asked him to help examine the Bigfoot corpse on Saturday the 16th, which is still at an undisclosed location.

When the group of several investigators got to the freezer holding the alleged body, they estimated its hairy contents “weighed over 1,500 pounds and it would take several days or longer to thaw completely,” so they called it a night.

The next day, Kulls and others plucked off a bit of hair exposed as the ice melted. Thinking it looked suspicious, Kulls and his colleagues then burned the hair, noting that “the sample melted into a ball uncharacteristic of hair.” Tom Biscardi, the CEO of Searching for Bigfoot, Inc., then gave the investigators permission to rapidly thaw the body with heat lamps. Within an hour, part of the head was free of ice. “I was able to feel that it seemed mostly firm, but unusually hollow in one small section,” says Kull in the release. “This was yet another ominous sign.”

But the real clincher came just an hour later, Kulls writes: “A break appeared up near the feet area. As the team and I began examining this area near the feet, I observed the foot which looked unnatural, reached in and confirmed it was a rubber foot.”

Kull called Biscardi, who then contacted Dyer and Whitton, who in turn “admitted [the body] was a costume," the posting goes on to say. Biscardi arranged a meeting for the next morning in the California hotel room where the two men from Georgia were staying. The hoaxers apparently agreed to admit to the fraud in writing, according to Kull’s posting. But when Biscardi stopped by their hotel sometime on Sunday, they were nowhere to be found.

Now instead of hunting Bigfoot, it sounds like Biscardi and his crew will be hunting down Dyer and Whitton: “Searching for Bigfoot, Inc., is seeking justice for themselves and for all the people who were deceived by this deception.”

Photo: Tom Biscardi at last Friday's press conference in Palo Alto, Calif.
Image credit: Erik Vance/copyright 2008 Scientific American